During the holiday season we are asked to believe in many ways. Whether this belief be faith based, be about Santa Claus, or the belief that peace on earth and good will toward men is each of our jobs everyday, we are asked to believe in intangible concepts that require us to take a leap.

In the spirit of the season, I'm going to ask you to believe and take a leap with me. What I ask of you is not to believe that a man in a red suite can make it down your chimney and deliver gifts to your children, but that the roles we play in the HR industry can be performed in a very different way and have profound impacts on the business. What I ask you to believe is that we can change HR to be a function that delivers true business value. Knowledge Infusion has long been a believer that HR can be a function that leads the business and changes the game. We work with clients everyday to create HCM and Talent Managment StrategyMaps that lay out the roadmap to build an HR function that delivers business value.

While this began as an intangible concept three short years ago when Jason Averbook and Heidi Spirgi founded the company, it is one that has shown many tangible results. Are you ready to believe you can change the game?

It was late on the evening of the 24th of December. Our children had gone to bed and my wife and I had pulled all the gifts out of the closet and began the task of putting things together. I drew the short straw and landed the elaborate train set that boasted over 100 pieces boldly on the outside of the packaging. How bad could it be I thought? Well, over an hour later when I had finished putting it together with no less than 3 extra pieces and no logical place for them to go, I knew what the warning "some assembly required" was really telling me.

As I shake off the after effects of what seems like a week long holiday celebration and prepare myself for the New Year, I can only think how this story has similar meaning to those of you contemplating a Talent Management technology initiative. Just like the instructions on the package warned that some assembly would be required to make that train set work, so must you adequately plan to implement your Talent Management software. As much as hosted solutions and software as a service give you a great platform from which to build, it doesn't do it itself. There is no magic box that, once turned on, will solve all your organizational ills. Talent Management software initiatives take work. They take planning and careful execution that if done right, will provide much traction with the talent in your organization. Knowledge Infusion has long advocated that technology initiatives are really 40% about the people, 40% about the process, and only 20% about the technology that enables the rest of it to work.

As you approach the New Year and begin to plan your Talent Management technology initiatives for 2008, take care to spend the time up front to really think about the people it will impact and the process you will have them go through. As great as the technology has become, it won't do the change management for you. Remember, some assembly is required to make your Talent Management technology initiative work.

As a Knowledge Infusion consultant, it's my job to work with organizations to define their HCM and Talent Management strategies and create actionable plans to begin to execute on that strategy. As part of this process, we do an extensive review of the existing HR Technology infrastructure and conduct discovery interviews with stakeholders to glean current insights. Once complete, we analyze and synthesize the data collected to determine elements of the initial recommendation list. We then conduct an iterative review of the material and begin to refine the list to arrive at the final recommendation set and action plan. This entire process is aimed at creating a strategy poised to deliver not just HR value, but business value.

Often times during this process, I run into issues that are tough to deal with. I uncover significant deficiencies that will be a challenge for the client to deal with and overcome. This sometimes comes in the form of a series of bad or misguided technology decisions that detract from achieving stated goals. When I find myself in these situations, I am compelled to speak up. It's my obligation to tell the client what they may not want to hear in order to get them where they want to go. It's my job to deliver the bad news and turn it into a plan that aims to transform HR. It's through this approach and committment that together with clients, we develop a strategy that is not only achievable, but also produces true business value.

There... I said it. Sorry to burst your bubble software vendors. Having spent a large part of my career in the vendor community myself, I know that the software usually seems to get the starring role in Talent Management projects. But our experience at Knowledge Infusion with the clients we help is that the software plays - at best - a strong supporting role in successful Talent Management deployments.

In my opinion, the factors that play a much more important role are as follows:

Courageous Leadership: Whether it is an executive with vision who is not afraid of "rocking the boat," a middle manager that champions a project, or an influential front line member of the implementation team, it often takes courage to execute these projects. Courage to combat the inertia that exists in many organizations, courage to evangelize change and progress, courage to influence, cajole, and shepherd reluctant stakeholders. Governance goes hand in hand with leadership. It's important to have well-defined decision processes in place during the strategy and implementation phases of your project. Without one or more courageous individuals driving these initiatives, they have limited hope of success.

Strategy: Having a clear picture of what your organization is trying to accomplish over the short, medium, and long term is imperative. Your talent management strategy should be closely tied to the business outcomes you're trying to achieve. Ideally, your strategy should go beyond business process automation to impacting the bottom line of your business.

Business Process Work: As you evaluate and implement the software that will enable your strategy, significant time should be spent understanding the needs of your business and developing processes that will meet and exceed those needs. Ideally, your goal should be to quantum leap your business processes far into the future. Although some of what you want to do may not be possible with current technology, this exercise will lay down the groundwork for years to come. This work should be completed at a high level first, then fine-tuned to make best use of the technology solution you select.

Change Management (Deployment Excellence): Your approach should go far beyond training. Marketing, Marketing, Marketing. Create a buzz. Make it fun and effective. Although users will need to know how to use your new tools and processes, today's applications are very intuitive. To really drive a high level of adoption, you must pique users interest and energize them. Help them understand the big picture, as well as how they'll need to do things differently.

So, although technology is important, it is only one of many factors necessary to successfully change the face of Talent Management in your organization. It's important that you and your team realize that technology is only one piece of the puzzle. By looking at your Talent Management initiative holistically, and realizing it is much more than a technology project, your chances of success will be greatly increased.

Just cast my vote to a poll on Phil Fersht's Horses for Sources outsourcing blog in which he asks the question, 'Will an economic downturn spark a new wave of outsourcing?' According to the results, I'm a contrarian in that I don't believe there will be a sudden uptick in the number of organizations outsourcing business processes. I say this looking through a narrow scope of the HR function. The bottom line is that I don't feel any looming slowdown will be severe enough for organizations to suddenly accelerate their offloading processes and personnel any more than they already are. In addition, a U.S. dollar that continues to get weaker and weaker will also render such deals less compelling from a pure economic standpoint.

In other words, I believe the thesis that the trend already in place for steady growth in outsourcing HR processes - primarily those that are high-volume, non-core, and standardized (e.g., benefits administration, compliance training, payroll, managed servicing and support of HR applications) - is the correct one. Check out the latest predictions and examination of the HR outsourcing supplier landscape from IDC's Lisa Rowan if you're interested in learning more about the numbers and what's behind them.

I think the majority of outsourcing over the next few years will remain limited to IT (e.g., managed services and support of HR software) and high-volume, administrative processes such as payroll and compliance training. Strategic, talent tanagement processes such as performance consulting, compensation planning, and creation of custom training programs will remain in-house for the most part as organizations evolve them to better manage today's, multi-generational and transient workforce.

As I thought about this distinction between non-core, administrative processes and strategic, value-add processes, it resurfaced for me a term that a really savvy (tongue-in-cheek) HR outsourcing marketeer or consultant must have come up with a few years ago when targeting senior HR and CLOs with their value proposition. The term I'm referring to is 'Learning Outsourcing.' I first came across the term at an ASTD conference in 2002. I'm sure it pre-dates that. To this day, some vendors offer a service line under this moniker. If anyone working in marketing for such an outsourcer reads this, I hope they will take the initiative to rebrand.

When I read or hear the term, I cringe. How can an organization outsource its ability to learn? What a false promise. What a slap in the face to all believers in the writings of Peter Senge! What's next? 'Leadership Outsourcing?!' OK. End of rant.

It may seem like semantics to some. After all, the term 'learning outsourcing' may be simple short-hand for more appropriate yet less catchy terms 'learning business process outsourcing' or 'training and development outsourcing.'

To me, simply reinforces how immature the business process outsourcing (BPO) market is. As a consultant, I do see corporate T&D departments looking for ways to re-engineer processes so they are accessible to global employees, partners and customers who can benefit from personalized, self-service learning utilizing the latest technologies. And like other HR functions, they will increase their outsourcing of IT platform management and non-core tasks such as the creation of online learning programs for years to come.

Will any get to the point of outsourcing their organization's learning? Only those that go out of business or sell out to someone else.

At Knowledge Infusion we work with both end user organizations and vendors helping to define the future of talent management. After three years of intense focus and growth of the industry, there are still wildly divergent points of view in the market of what true talent management is...WHAT it looks like, HOW it should function, and WHO is responsible for it. The verdict is still out whether HR departments, business leaders and talent management vendors will be able to transform to deliver to the potential.

Here are a few of the measures of success that will define the day when we (the collective human capital management and talent management community) will know we've made it...

1. Talent planning is as essential to the business planning process as the budgeting process

2. Talent dashboards show the correlation between business KPI's (sales, service,production, and quality) and talent attributes (competencies, training, compensation, performance, potential, source of hire)

3. Competencies are developed by the business, managed by HR

4. Talent management suites are bought by CEO's, CFO's, and GM's

5. All business leaders understand and measure the correlation between employee engagement and customer engagement

6. Talent management applications look and feel like consumer applications...easy, simple and content rich

7. Talent management applications leverage operational data to measure talent productivity and quality

8. Employees have access to relevant information to help them identify career and development opportunities that leverage their interests and abilities

9. Organizations know more about their employees than they do their candidates

10. Talent management include intelligence to identify employees at risk and alerts to managers about relevant development and mobility opportunities for their employees

For now, I'll take even one or two of these as a sign of industry health. Let's all think big and create change.