Paradigm shifts are mental revolutions, transformations, or metamorphoses. When one occurs our way of thinking changes and with it our view of the world and how it works. The concept was defined and popularized by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolution to explain the historical evolution of scientific thought, which he described as “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions...where one conceptual world is replaced by another.” The shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican view of the universe exemplified one such shift while the shift from Newtonian physics to Relativity and Quantum Physics exemplified another.

Corporate staffing began its technology driven paradigm shift in the late ‘90s when the Internet gave birth to the first job boards. From the start it was a well-publicized event, which would lead one to suppose that by now it would be well advanced, perhaps nearly old business.

But that’s not the case. READ MORE >

If your talent-related presentations to the board need more punch, The IBM Institute for Business Value’s recently released report, “Analytics in the Boardroom,” will be helpful. It focuses on corporate boards’ increasing need for, and reliance on, data-supported answers to tough business questions and the ways that the most advanced, analytics-minded organizations are responding.

The analyses and recommendations, while not developed specifically for corporate talent acquisition and management leaders, speak directly to the problems of credibility, relevance and impact faced by so many of those leaders when trying to position their departments as indispensable corporate partners.

Some Organizations are Indeed Different

Every business organization is analytically minded to some extent, but the range of sophistication is very broad. IBM’s collaborative study with MIT/Sloan Management Review documents this range in a number of ways:

• 57% — The increase from 2010 to 2011 in number of organizations using analytics to create competitive advantage.
   
• 2X — Organizations using sophisticated analytics are more than twice as likely to substantially outperform their peers than those who aren’t. READ MORE >

With respect to technology, the pressure on corporate talent acquisition managers continued to rise in 2011. Performance remains an issue (1 in 5 HRMS clients would change vendors).  The legacy issue of ownership—how IT and HR share control—remained largely unresolved. New generations of software continued to raise the ante on system integration and data sharing (only 15% of clients can multi-source data). And change management—coming to terms with social media (29% growth), cloud services (50% growth) and mobile platforms—challenged everyone.

Change management dominated the conversation and probably will again in 2012. ”Don’t miss the boat; don’t be left behind” is the favored message of vendors seeking market traction, of news outlets crafting headlines and of pundits punditing, but it’s not the critical issue.

In most organizations a wall still separates IT providers and IT users. As we explain in our upcoming Technology Report, that wall was built for sensible reasons but one unforeseen consequence was that users’ knowledge of the working tools they relied on steadily diminished. Relinquishing responsibility meant gradually relinquishing expertise. READ MORE>