Three minute video summary:
Consortium members met in Raleigh, NC in May of 2013 to explore Talent Management, Cross-Organizational Resources, and People Profiles.
Greg Oxton with the Consortium opened the meeting with some thoughts around moving from the current vendor-centric business practices to the emerging economic model of an individual-centric world. This shift will require much more flexibility in organizational staffing and skills than is currently supported, and will require organizations to manage people profiles for both the organization and their customers.
Rodney Dunn and Darlene Gibbs from Cisco updated us on their Workforce Evolution model. Their goals are to retain talent, attract new talent, and drive capacity, which they are doing through a program of majors and minors. Engineers work in their major, or core role, and can select areas of interest in which to minor, which align with their strategic objectives.
Cisco has had the backing of managers and directors, and engineers are receptive to this program, but because the value isn’t immediate, it makes it difficult to assess its effectiveness.
As presented by Ron Taylor, Sage is in the early stages of building a reputation model that link people to their contributions in major areas such as knowledge creation, peer collaboration, and customer facing activities.
Fred Visser described how National Instruments has implemented the engineering leadership program, where support engineers are hired specifically with intention of moving them out of support and into other parts of the organization in about 18 months. The support organization is seen as an intensive training ground, and when engineers move out of the organization, they do so with an understanding of NI’s customer experience as well as a network of peers spread throughout the organization.
The Open Space session explored great questions, including:
- How do we measure performance and manage compensation within a network structure?
- How do you let people know the value that they are producing?
- How do you ensure productivity is achieved while you have all this innovation/creativity happening?
John Muchnok from Oracle offered a good example of moving towards an individual-centric world with Oracle’s Proactive assistance program which facilitates proactive engagements with managed accounts. These are engagements delivered in the customer context, often by a cross-organizational team, and the knowledge which is created is captured for reuse.
The topic of people profiles and reputation models is an ongoing area of focus for the Consortium. Through our member’s experience, we are gaining insight to the value of profiles, how to use them, and most importantly, emerging best practices on how to create and manage them. Members can find more information on the wiki (email Kelly Murray for access).