The rumor circulating for the past few weeks has now been confirmed: Oracle is buying Taleo, a global talent management vendor, for $1.9 billion. This is just another — albeit important — acquisition in the strategic talent management space. All companies must have core HR systems in place, but now it’s equally important to look at the strategic part of HR: the performance, succession, career development, and learning components as a layer resting on top of the core. Companies want to retain, develop, and reward their employees and need these applications in place for efficiency and effectiveness.

With this acquisition, Oracle gets a vendor with these talent management components in a pure SaaS deployment model, which provides ultimate flexibility. However, the offerings in the suite are not equally robust. Taleo is known for its recruiting app; to become a suite vendor, it added performance, which has gotten mixed reviews, and learning, which is not best in its class. Learn.com, the vendor Taleo acquired for learning, works OK for the midmarket, but its functionality does not hold up well for large global and enterprise customers.

Oracle can’t buck the SaaS tide any more. SaaS is the preferred deployment model for talent management, and the large ERP vendors like SAP (finalizing its acquisition of SuccessFactors) and Oracle are now joining the movement. Oracle offers Fusion, but a lot of work still needs to be done to develop this into a full SaaS talent suite. Once this deal closes, watch and see how Oracle positions the Taleo offerings with Fusion Talent Management.

Boris Evelson and I have published research entitled “Use HR Analytics To Optimize Talent Processes.”

The premise: HR analytics have taken on new importance as companies work to find, develop, and retain top talent. Using analytics requires asking the right questions that address key organizational pain points and determining the metrics and best practices that will move the company toward greater productivity. We anticipate that this report will help guide HR professionals as they focus on analytics to support recruiting, performance, and learning.

HR faces a challenge of proving its value in helping to set business priorities. Data from technology solutions now give HR the opportunity to become a valued business partner in determining the appropriate metrics to help the executive suite and people in other lines of business make important talent management decisions. The tactical role of advertising for and finding employees, negotiating the hires, and bringing employees on board is no longer enough; HR must become a strategic business partner.

We recommend that you start with solid foundational components including data sources, data extraction and integration processes, master data management (MDM), and an HR data mart as the official HR data repository. Once that’s in place, you need to build queries, reports, and dashboards. Medium-size organizations may use a packaged solution, but large global enterprises with many business units will have to assemble these components.

You read that number right: seventy percent, a dramatically high rate of failure. It could happen to you unless you take into account that any business process change is strongly related to personal change — that means your people — and this is often the component that gets shortchanged. Organizations fail to realize the impact of change on the employees it will affect and do not plan and execute carefully enough to address the people issues through all phases of business process change management. Today’s business environment is constantly changing as companies work to stay competitive. But change only happens when workers change their thinking, beliefs, and behaviors. This is hard and requires constant effort from employees and executives.

Change management methodologies abound. Look carefully at ADKAR from Prosci and John Kotter’s The 8-Step Process for Leading Change; read Crucial Conversations by Patterson et al. They are rich in change theory and suggestions. Choose one methodology or components of many methodologies. What’s critical is that you do not miss any of the following six principles:

The change manager (managing the people change) and the project manager (managing the technology change) must plan together; they work in parallel but have constant interaction to make sure the initiative is moving ahead on both fronts.

To make your change management efforts work, follow these best practices:

• Get project sponsorship from a leader who understands people change management.
• Make sure you have the change management resources and a budget.
• Communicate constantly with employees by engaging them in discussions and keeping them informed.

A major announcement in the human capital management (HCM) world occurred on April 26, 2011. SuccessFactors, a top vendor in performance management, announced its intention to purchase Plateau Systems, a leading learning management system (LMS) vendor. Although both vendors have competing products in the talent management space, Plateau had something SuccessFactors needed: an LMS. With the loss of GeoLearning, SuccessFactors’ former LMS partner, which was acquired by SumTotal in January 2011, SuccessFactors was left with a gaping hole in its solution set. Although SuccessFactors executives believe that the future of learning is more in the informal and social realms, organizations need and want LMSes to manage their increasing compliance training needs while keeping a close eye on the whole social and informal learning market. Organizations also have formal courses and simulated and role-play learning that the LMS tracks and reports on. The word is that SuccessFactors’ sales staff have been bemoaning the lack of an LMS to help them close deals. Today, organizations are much more interested in getting multiple HRM functionality from one vendor. Often this suite approach includes performance, compensation, learning, and even recruiting (for more details, see my “Four Pillars of Talent Management” research report). SuccessFactors now has a very strong and complete “four-pillar” solution.

At Forrester, we think of strategic talent management as made up of four pillars: Recruiting, Performance (including succession and career development), Learning, and Compensation, which sit on top of the core HR system that manages employee records and transactions. These four pillars of HRM (human resource management) have taken on critical importance in the past year. Organizations find talent that they must bring up to full productivity as quickly as possible. Leaders want to make sure employees have performance goals and appropriate formal and informal training to help them meet these goals. For those strong performers, variable compensation rewards their work efforts. Technology is available to automate all these processes, but up until this year, few vendors provided functionality in all four strategic HRM pillars.