Earlier this week, SuccessFactors announced the acquisition of CubeTree.  CubeTree is a small and relatively unknown vendor who specializes in the emerging "social" or enterprise collaboration space.  This acquisition, though small in the grand scheme of things, signifies what I believe to be a material change in what talent management is and what it will shortly become.

Enterprise collaboration is not necessarily new, but recent advances in technology, service delivery and user engagement is changing how employees work.  Enterprise collaboration is no longer about "knowledge management" or creating a huge library of documents that can be shared.  Its about sharing ideas across their organization, getting input and feedback from people you may not know within your company, find the experts and thought leaders, and creating ad hoc internal groups that cut across organizational structures and boundaries.

What does this mean for talent management?  Talent management, or unified talent management as more recently described, has been primarily focused on process and automation.  In essence, talking existing manual processes (not always the best, by the way) and putting them online.  The biggest challenge in the first generation of talent management is that it has not created material business impact.  Talent still can't be mobilized, experts are still buried under hierarchy, and high performers are still not being optimally leveraged.

The technology has also lacked "stickiness".  The average user/employee doesn't use talent management applications today to do his job better.  In fact, most users avoid the process-heavy, compliance driven nature of today's applications and use it only when forced to do dreaded tasks like performance reviews, job requisitions, etc.

Enterprise collaboration changes today's flawed model of talent management.  Talent management is now informal, collaborative, social, immediate, open, engaging, [add your word here], ...

Source: CubeTree

The question remains -- where is HR in defining and aligning enterprise collaboration with talent management?  Today, HR is invisible in the conversation that is current dominated at one end by IT who is solely focused on the technology and deployment risks, and the other end by the "creators", typically the younger demographic employees, that are already bringing the new collaborative technologies into the company without the knowledge of HR or IT.

One last thing to note, SuccessFactors is not the first talent management vendor to recognize the impact of collaboration on talent management and investing accordingly.  Cornerstone OnDemand's Cornerstone Connect product has actually been on the market for a few years now.  More recently, Saba has released Saba Social to

blend informal learning, talent and collaboration.

The question for you -- what are you doing today to change your talent management strategy?