Petra Nelson, Managing Director of Bright People Technologies, writes that the days of companies creating and maintaining employee records are numbered. Instead, organisations will access and contribute to externally held profiles of individuals.
There is a paradigm shift occurring in Enterprise people information management that is rapidly changing the way that data is gathered, accessed, stored and shared.
I must be getting old because I remember my first day as a bright-eyed junior recruiter at the world’s largest recruitment agency. I was handed three boxes containing hundreds of cards – much like a Teledex. The cards were sorted into groups that classified our branch’s temporary staff by position and skill type. This was my introduction to people data management.
In the more than two decades since then, I have seen people information management morph from hard copy personnel files in big filing cabinets, to in-house HR systems hosted on company servers, to “cloud” systems. I have seen major companies spend millions on manual duplication of the same information, creation of integration platforms and internal “data lakes” … and the list goes on.
Most companies have recognised that internally siloed information drives inefficiencies and cost and are now seeking to develop an internal “single source of truth” for use by all parts of the business, including HR, safety, finance, operations and planning.
It sounds good, but there are some problems with this model.
- It only works if the individual maintains an ongoing, unbroken relationship with the company, and
- The company must have the systems and motivation in place to ensure that an individual’s information is contemporary.
Increasingly, this is not the way the world works. The gig economy, increased casualisation of workforces, self-learning, consulting, contracting, parental leave, outsourcing, volunteering, skill development, expat roles and more, all place pressure on the ability of internal systems to maintain up-to-date data.
Really, only one person knows and is genuinely interested in the truth – the individual who is associated with the record.
Where is all this leading?
It is our observation that organisations will move away from people information being siloed within departments or even companies. Instead, we are not far away from the day when Enterprise organisations collectively access trusted, centralised repositories of people information for their business and industry needs.
Why would they do this?
It’s simple – cost and truth.
The cost of maintaining a “data record” is extremely high, particularly when engagement with an individual is interrupted and the record is leveraged by multiple systems. Follow ups, duplication and cost to integrate data sources are all incredibly expensive overheads.
Similarly, the cost of duplication drives cost across whole industries. Every person onboarded, recruited, deployed or mobilised goes through almost identical verification processes. What if this duplication was wiped out altogether?
The need for truth is also pushing cost into organisations. Liability associated with the risk of incorrect information drives real costs, such as insurance premiums, sky high. There are numerous examples of reputational cost, and the health industry immediately springs to mind, with fake doctor credentials in the news in recent years. The cost to organisations to verify information is getting expensive in more ways than one.
Evidence
This move to using sharing platforms for data access and usage is well underway.
Right now, companies are managing multi-vendor billion-dollar projects on Aconex, accessing booking travel from global distribution systems, leveraging weather data via APIs, and using LinkedIn for recruitment.
The move to access, contribute to and interface with a centralised and verified source of people truth is not so very far away.
Who Cares?
You should. Before you build expensive paradigms around managing a person’s records in the many organisational systems you use – think again. That investment might very quickly become obsolete.