« Shifting local assets | Main | Confronting offshoring »
July 14, 2005
Tracking your human capital assets
One of the major complaints I raise about corporate reporting system (see earlier posting on Reporting Intangibles) is that companies don't even track, let alone report, on their human capital. That might be changing (at least on the tracking side), according to a story in today's Wall Street Journal "IBM Tool Dispatches Employees Efficiently":
Inside its giant services arm, International Business Machines has begun an ambitious project to catalog employees and sort them into a finely woven glossary of technical skills. The project's most visible facet is Professional Marketplace, a pilot program launched this year, through which about 6,000 IBM consultants have access to the database of IBM employees, about 22,000 so far, who are available to work on the jobs they have landed.
. . .
Using Marketplace, IBM consultants working for customers can search through 100 job classifications and 10,000 skills, figuring out who inside IBM is available, where they are located and roughly how much it costs the company to use them.
. . .
Mr. Moffat [Bob Moffat, a senior vice president in charge of IBM's supply chain] also says Marketplace is helping consultants find niche skills and get to work on contracts faster, factors that could help boost revenue, not just cut costs. Marketplace sorts through 100 job classifications from Account Technical Representative to Web Specialist. (Consultants needing a spark of genius for a project can query for a "Visionary Thought Leader.") The 10,000 skills run the gamut from vague descriptions such as "mentoring" to specific experience with the minutiae of health-care privacy regulations. Base rates for employees run from $10 to $400 an hour, and the software adjusts that figure based on such factors as how far away from home the employee will be working and how long he or she is needed.
Done right, this could also be a major breakthrough for management strategic planning as well as operations. Senior management could look at the database and determine what skills are lacking in the organization and what skills are in the most demand by the market place. This information could be used for marketing, to position the company strategically, and to guide acquisitions and recruitment.
Look for other companies to create similar systems. But IBM clearly sees this system as a source of competitive advantage:
One thing IBM probably won't do is sell the Marketplace software. "Certainly not to people in our industry," Mr. Moffat says.
I think that this may change, however. If IBM can work out the intellectual property issues to keep the specifics out of the hands of their competitors, this could be a large market for IBM Business Services. Every company need to be able to track its human capital -- not just consulting firms. Once they have refined the system internally, I would not be surprised to see IBM sell not the packaged software but the consulting service to create a customized system in other industries.
If the use of such human capital tracking systems becomes wide-spread, it could greatly enhance to the competitiveness of both companies and the US economy. It would be a major step toward the I-Cubed Economy.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at July 14, 2005 10:37 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.athenaalliance.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/227
Comments
The idea that tracking 'Human Capital' has significance is, of course a splendid idea but misses the point. The significance of of actors in organisations, it their capability interact.
In recent research I have been looking at href=�http://www.managementclarity.com/model.htm�>relationship value which is one of the lesser considered intangibles but which had more effect on tangibles and intangibles than any other value.
Posted by: David Phillips at July 22, 2005 9:12 AM