Your Talent Management Legacy – Maintain and Survive or Go Bold and Thrive?

There’s a lot of talk these days about legacy. As President Obama nears the 6-year mark of his time in office, discussion has already turned to what his legacy will be, based on his term-to-date as well as how his remaining decisions will impact his historical legacy.

The high cost of legacy systems

When it comes to human capital challenges for today’s federal HR leaders, what will your talent management legacy be? In my discussions with today’s human capital leaders, it seems there is so much time and energy spent merely keeping their organization’s wheels turning, it might be safe to say that if the systems around them did not crash and burn, that’s a pretty good legacy – and it’s true!

But to go above and beyond “pretty good” – to leave a legacy where your successors will reap significant benefits from the decisions made today to improve talent management exponentially within your organization – bigger and bolder steps need to be taken. While it seems the task is herculean, the reality is that’s not the case.

Talent management legacies can realistically be achieved. What’s needed is decisiveness.

While federal IT spending has stagnated in recent years, agencies are spending more and more on maintaining legacy systems. Sometimes this can’t be avoided, but in a way it is fool’s money.

Maintenance spending for legacy systems as a proportion of total IT spending has increased from 61% in 2008 to a projected 73% in FY 2015, according to the Government Business Council. Agencies spent an amazing $53 billion on legacy IT maintenance in FY 2014.

The benefits of modernization

Unlike the traditional ownership model that limits flexibility and impedes modernization, cloud-based talent management solutions that allow agencies to pay as they go with a predictable cost structure bring other benefits as well, including:

• scalability
• efficiency
• ability to easily upgrade.

And those are just the “infrastructure” benefits. Besides these, modern talent management systems bring together enhanced capabilities and interfaces in recruitment, retention, onboarding, performance management and employee development.

Modern talent management systems that are easier to use, do more, cost less and are straightforward to deploy are yours for the taking.

Go bold and thrive.