A Look Back at the History of Gartner's Coverage of Talent Management Applications (Part 1)

I was working on a new feature for the blog, a page that has a summary and links to my Gartner research, and I noticed the notes that we had done over the years about Talent Management.  I thought it might make an interesting series of posts to take you through the history of our coverage, where we got it right, where we got it wrong, and how our thinking has evolved over time.

I started at Gartner in May 2002.  The first task I was given, in no uncertain terms, was to update the Magic Quadrant for Large Enterprise HRMS.  I had never done one before, but I dived in and over the next five months completed that task.  However, during that time I was starting to get inquiries from clients related to competency management and a variety of niche applications.  I was getting more of these than I was getting around HRMS solutions.  So, as I started to work on an update to the Magic Quadrant for Midmarket HRMS (which I scaled back to US midmarket), I started to think about this trend.  I published "The Coming Resurgence of Competency Management" (subscription required) in February 2003.  It was really the first time I talked about what would become the core of what we know as a talent management application suite today.  Here is what I said:

Many enterprisewide competency initiatives bog down because of insufficient capabilities to maintain competency information. Client/server HRMS solutions that had integrated competency management were not distributable and were used only by human resources professionals. New point solutions (as well as solutions from traditional enterprise resource planning [ERP] II/HRMS vendors) that leverage Web technology focus on recruitment, performance management, career development and compensation management, and extend these services to employees and line managers as well as human resources. By pushing the ownership of competency data out to employees, team leaders and project managers, enterprises are much more likely to be able to effectively use (and thus more compelled to maintain) competency information.

It was really competencies that put me on the trail because it was the common element that tied these applications together.  Competencies certainly remain an important part of the discussion (I got that pretty right).  In Part 2, I will discuss how we finally realized that the suite concept was emerging.