Of the dozens of customers Knowledge Infusion has helped plan and execute their Talent Management initiatives, not one - ZERO - have chosen to use web services to integrate their Talent Management applications with their HRIS or other internal apllications. They all use flat-file feeds to pass data back and forth between HRIS databases and the vendor datacenters on a scheduled basis. Part of the reason for this is because although most vendors claim to support web-services, few try to convince clients of the value of this technology. On the customer side, many corporate IT departments are not convinced they can use web services to send data securely through their corporate firewalls to an external datacenter. This, despite the fact that companies like eBay and Amazon have conducted billions of dollars of business using web-services.

For the technically challenged among us, the term "web services" describes a standardized way of integrating web-based applications. Web services enable small chunks of data to be transmitted in real-time when a transaction is performed, rather than in a huge file with other transaction data on a scheduled basis. Web-services has been over-shadowed lately in the Web 2.0 world by social media (social networks, wikis, blogs), but folks, without web-services, Web 2.0 is much more static.

To put the use of web services in a talent management context, let's say your company wants to hire a candidate that has cleared the interview process. The hire can be executed in your onboarding system and instantaneously transmitted to your HRIS or other applications to begin all the tasks that are required to onboard an employee (schedule orientation, arrange equipment and office space, provide building and system access, etc...). By avoiding the usual 24 hour lag time for each time transaction data is transmitted between systems, the entire employee onboarding experience is improved. It could make a huge difference in the length of time it takes a new employee to become fully productive - not to mention creating a positive experience in general for the new employee when they show up on their first day and are all set to go.

We're curious why more vendors or their customers aren't taking advantage of web services. So if you're out there, whether you're a software provider or a customer, if you're using web-services through a corporate firewall for talent management processes, we would love to hear from you. Let us know what you're doing!