Keeping Your Management System Simple
Jason Averbook and Heidi Spirgi


The iPod is an icon of simplicity. How has a device with a single-click wheel and one button created a paradigm shift in music? How has a device that's small enough to put in your pocket transformed the way people interact — or don't — in public spaces? How did Apple get it so right when other manufacturers of portable music devices got it so wrong?

It focused on simplicity — the art of delivering just what is needed, no more, in a way that is intuitive to the end-user. This goes far beyond user interface design. It goes to the heart of the purpose, context and marketing of the iPod.

To do this, Apple focused on three principles of simplicity:

• Audience. Who is the user? Teenagers, students, audiophiles, business travelers, children, corporations?

• Outcome. What does it want to deliver to the buyer? Sound quality, portability, gaming, music, audiobooks, movies, photos, a camera?

• Experience. When and how will the buyers interact with the iPod? Under what conditions and in what context? During the day, at night, while running, while walking through an airport, in the shower, with solar power, via speakers or headphones? What content and related functions will they need when using the iPod? Music downloads, synchronization, software updates, music reviews?

To be successful, Apple narrowed its goal and focused on a subset of possible audiences, outcomes and experiences. The iPod was not developed with children, students or corporations as the primary audience. It was not designed to replace portable gaming devices. It was not designed to be listened to in the shower, to be powered by solar energy or to deliver music reviews to the buyer.

Apple's goal with its first release of the iPod was not to include all possible features but to create a high-quality, simple and consistent music experience. Apple consciously chose to forgo many features that are still common on far-less-successful brands.

By focusing on these principles of simplicity and crisply defining audience, outcome and experience, Apple got it right and revolutionized the way music is consumed in the 21st century.

Three Principles of Simplicity

These same three principles of simplicity apply to getting it right with your talent management system.

Audience: Who are your users, and what are they like?

Unlike other human capital management (HCM) technologies, the primary users of talent management systems are not administrators or power users — they are the employees, managers and executives who interact with the system, sometimes daily, sometimes annually.

Successful talent management initiatives require laserlike focus on the perspective of the end-user. Because talent managers are not the ultimate end-users, talent management project teams should look for ways to incorporate employee and manager perspective into every phase of the project.

Outcome: What business outcomes are you driving toward?

Are you looking to operationalize your business plan by creating greater organizational alignment? Are you looking to increase levels of compliance? Are you looking to grow the bench strength of pivotal roles?

Getting clear about what business outcomes you are driving toward is a prerequisite to delivering just what is needed — no more, no less. Without a focus on business outcome, organizations tend to select, develop and roll out talent management systems that are dense in functionality, hard to follow, deliver little value and encounter user resistance and low adoption.

Experience: When and how will the user interact with the talent management system?

As with the iPod, it's critical to define the anticipated conditions and context in which users will use a talent management system. Will they use it daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly? Will they need access to it while flying, from home, on a mobile device? How will they find the application — portal, intranet, e-mail link? How many clicks are required to access it? To what other information, content and related transactions will they need access? What are they likely doing at the time when they need access to the system?

By focusing your talent management strategy, vendor selection and deployment around these three principles of simplicity, you can create a user experience that is simple and transparent without compromising the richness of outcome.

Building Blocks of Simplicity

To drive the three core principles of simplicity into your talent management initiative, follow these six steps:

1. The Proverbial "Less is More"

One of the most common mistakes in talent management initiatives is the assumption that more is better.

Before vendor selection, this manifests itself as business requirements or a request for proposal (RFP) that documents every possible current and future business requirement. These typically are divorced from business outcome and often reflect broken business processes. By documenting every possible requirement, organizations tend to lose sight of what they are trying to accomplish and divert their focus from their core audience, desired business outcome and user experience.

During vendor selection, this manifests itself as the common belief that companies need the best, most feature-rich or the "Cadillac" system in the category. This type of thinking results in more systems to implement, more vendors to hold accountable, more contracts to negotiate, more interfaces to build and more user interfaces to learn. In such an environment, simplicity is almost impossible to achieve, and user satisfaction suffers.


In addition, with a combination of unintegrated point solutions, most talent management departments find themselves unable to deliver on business outcomes. Most business outcomes require an integrated approach to talent. Talent management systems need to operate in conjunction with one another via business process integration and workflow to truly deliver the desired outcome.

After vendor selection, organizations once again fall prey to the assumption that more is better. Even when they select an integrated talent management solution, project teams often mistakenly try to implement too much functionality (See Figure 1). In each of these examples, the initiative failed as result of trying to roll out too much rich functionality, which, in the end, compromised the focus on audience, business outcomes and user experience.

2. Strategy and Process Before Technology

Central to talent management simplicity is ensuring there are clear, defined goals about what a talent management initiative will drive. Similar to the design of the iPod, project teams should clearly define how it will be used, the types of users, the result desired and then the design that makes sense.

For years, organizations have picked technologies without understanding or modifying their existing broken processes, only to find the technology does not meet their requirements. According to the "2007 IHRIM/Knowledge Infusion Talent Management Survey," no talent management solution has more than a 10 percent "very satisfied" rating. The only reason for this is the disconnect between expectations and technology.

To transform your talent management processes, you should follow a simple three-step approach:

1. Understand and design the desired outcome and how you will measure that outcome.

2. Understand and design the optimal workflow and test the acceptance of this change.

3. Understand the components of the talent enterprise this new process touches and build integrations where possible.

By following these simple steps, you can ensure you are not just automating a paper-based, once-a-year process, but you are truly transforming your talent processes to meet the demands of the 21st century.

3. The Pace of Change

As with Apple and the first generation iPod, talent management systems shouldn't try to boil the ocean in the first year. It was only once Apple had proven it had "gotten it right" with music that it expanded its features, offering TV, movies, games, podcasts, photos and audiobooks. But with this expanded functionality, the simple user experience never was compromised. The same click wheel and single-button interface haven't been altered, yet much more power has been delivered.

This is an important lesson for talent management initiatives. By narrowing scope and understanding your organizational appetite for change, you can ensure you don't impose too much change too fast on your organization. Changing too quickly will result in the technology being blamed and will leave you in a potentially irrecoverable position.

4. Simplify the Talent Management Core

Many talent management initiatives fall apart at the core — the roles, organizational hierarchy and competencies that serve as the common currency of talent management systems. Overly complex organizational structures, role definitions, low-quality human resource management system (HRMS) job and department data that might not even reflect talent management's needs, competency models that are too shallow, too complex or too difficult to maintain all undermine the value of talent management solutions.

Successful talent management initiatives are built on a foundation of normalized, simplified organizational data (jobs, departments, reports to structure). Today, many organizations undertake job restructuring and organizational hierarchy projects to simplify these core definitional elements, as well as focus on the definition and normalization of their competency model.

5. The Employee Experience

Organizations continue to invest in talent management process design and technology, only to deploy the technology and bury it on an intranet. Employees are used to business-to-consumer Web sites such as Amazon and Google that drive usability as their key attributes. What does usability mean in the context of talent management simplicity?

a. Zero- or one-click access to solutions.

b. Single sign-on.

c. Technology designed for the employee, not the administrator.

d. Always on.

e. Collaboration.

Keep these five attributes in mind to ensure you don't dilute the value of your talent management solution with a sloppy deployment of a link.

6. Launch and They Will Come?

The art of solution deployment combines elegant processes, easy-to-use technology and marketing. The marketing aspect of any deployment is usually forgotten and can sink the success of the simplest of solution launches.

Creating a solution in regard to talent management requires a give-take approach. This means you provide the employees and managers value while you take information from them in an interactive format to measure the health and wealth of your human capital. To get the organization to use technology without it feeling like "just another thing to do," consider these easy steps:


a. Always think about what's in it for them and include it in your messages.

b. Never think you can over-market.

c. Understand your audience and develop messaging specific to each audience type.

d. Start early and build excitement.

e. Measure impact and continue follow-up marketing.

f. Communicate results back to the organization.

Vendors also are beginning to understand the importance of simplicity. Many respond to low user-satisfaction ratings with a focus on improving the user experience. They're building innovation labs that focus on redefining the user interface, as well as the broader user experience. Vendors also can learn from Apple.

Watch people learn how to use an iPod. They do so as a child learns — by trial and error, not by reading a user manual or taking a class. The next paradigm shift in talent management technology will be a radical redefinition of user experience, one centered on the principles of simplicity.

Jason Averbook is Knowledge Infusion’s chief executive officer, and Heidi Spirgi is the president of Knowledge Infusion.

http://www.talentmgt.com/performance_management/2007/June/350/index.php?pt=a&aid=350&start=12813&page=5