Human Capital Management and the Learning Process

There has been a lot of talk lately about human capital management. No one seems to have created a commonly accepted definition of HCM. Some of the definitions I have seen are quite broad and encompass all the elements that have an influence on people in organizations. Other definitions are narrower and focus on hiring, or performance management or on a few of these.

SAS defines HCM as "Organizational insight to drive effective strategies." I like that definition but it doesn't give me any clue as to what the elements are that might lead to effectiveness.

Others define it as strategies and/or tools for finding, attracting, assessing, developing, managing, and retaining top talent. This is fine but how is it different from Hr?

In the eyes of a CEO, HCM has to be defined as the processes and tools that increase profits, innovation or improve the effectiveness of the organization. HCM is not necessarily dependent on technology, although it would be hard to do without it.

Yesterday Hank Stringer of Hire.com and I did a half-day seminar for the Conference Board on this topic for about 20 executives from a variety of organizations across the country. It was interesting to see how varied their definitons and concepts about HCM were. It was also facinating to see how hard all of us struggle to articulate and define our worlds - professional and personal.

A lot of learning is about defining and creating frameworks to place actions, technologies or whatever into some sort of cognitive order. What Hank and I did was help these very intelligent executives construct a framework that let them see relationships and interdependencies. This led to several AHAs and a deeper understanding of what they need to do. I am hopeful they will say they "learned" a lot.