The latest IBM CFO survey that covered 889 CFOs and senior finance professionals in 74 countries disclosed an interesting roadmap for the future.

In order to transition from simply reporting historical financial data and assuring compliance to becoming more predictive and actively partnering with the business in decision making, several changes are needed.

This establishment of an agile finance organization, to a great extent, can be applied by HR leaders to building an Agile Talent Management Organization.

Agility is more than just being responsive to change. Three key actions must be delivered simultaneously: mitigate risk, improve performance, and enable growth.

Lately the HR focus in the US on the new OFCCP ruling on Internet applicant compliance – or co-employment for instance – may have made some HR leaders lean too much towards risk mitigation.

A strategic Talent Management organization sees OFCCP as only one aspect of the full spectrum. Looking only at risk will inevitably reduce you to a compliance department. Talent Management is way more and requires a holistic view. Finance faced this as well. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance put immense pressure on them.

Just like in finance, building an agile talent management model starts with a simplification and standardization of processes and technology to establish a single talent system of record with a talent master file for each individual. The second goal is a strong yet flexible analytics platform to provide immediate insight into your operations.

We believe that the on demand, software as a service (SaaS), configurable platform is uniquely designed to enable this model. A high level of configuration – as opposed to customization with the associated heavy upgrades – makes it the perfect technology infrastructure for the agile talent management model of the future.