| | July 20148CIOReviewBy Anthony Abbatiello, Managing Director, Global Head of HR Consulting, Accenture Strategy Digital technology is evolving at breakneck speed, changing the way businesses and governments fundamentally operate in a wide variety of ways. HR is no different. As digital enables talent management to become more democratized and more of an activity that is embedded into the fabric of everyday business, it will provide a significant opportunity to change for HR. Five major developments are poised to move this revolution forward: 1. Data and Integration will be KingAnalytics--the use of data to produce business-relevant insights that lead to action--has been heralded as the new step change for HR. Yet few HR organizations have a robust analytic capability, as collecting data can be expensive and time-consuming. In the future, companies will integrate existing warehouses of HR and talent data with Big Data obtained from social and local data sources--tweets, blog posts, RSS feeds, customer service feedback, GPS coordinates and more--to get a complete picture of their workforce's abilities, wants and needs.Analytics could make HR the strategic powerhouse it was meant to be--by positioning it to move from historical analysis (understanding what happened) to predictive analysis (forecasting what's going to happen and what talent levers HR must pull to improve business performance).2. Digital will give Power--and People Management--to the PeopleTechnology advances are enabling HR to put the "human" back into human resources, and helping give people management back to the people. This could include involving employees and managers in high-impact talent processes--including recruiting, hiring, succession planning, learning and shaping career paths. All this will happen thanks to an emerging class of social and market-based tools that will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional lives digitally.In this future, the administrative burden that HR organizations currently carry may lighten up considerably. Technology will continue to enable shared responsibilities across business and HR to maximize business results.3. Consumerization of Employee Used Applications Closely linked to the advent of cloud computing is the rise of businesses like LinkedIn, where talent management systems live on the web and are shared by companies. Today, employees and job candidates can input their resumes and skills on such sites. By doing so, they may circumvent the need for internal talent profile databases that aggregate individuals' skills, job history, education, competencies and more.Already, some organizations are drawing more on such external, public sites and integrating data from these sites into their own HR information systems. Although doing so may require some work matching data definitions used in external sites to data definitions used in internal systems, some companies are successfully blurring the line between internal and external applications.4. Digital Technologies will Enable Customized Talent ManagementMost organizations have already achieved maximum cost savings by using information technology to standardize and harmonize their people practices across their global operations. But HR professionals can now leverage that standardized framework to tailor employment practices to every worker. For example, companies can simply offer a greater variety of standard practices--in myopinionin my
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