The phrase Human Capital Management is relatively new in the industry and along with it comes a multitude of definitions, marketing spin, press releases, etc. The following is to serve as a primer or introduction to this market and to explain where CourseAvenue fits in.

What is HCM?

The overall human resources technology space is ever-evolving and seemingly always introducing "the next thing". As with many new concepts or technologies, sales and marketing speak can add confusion to the exact definition. HCM is a very broad term with training and education under the HCM umbrella or, pending your definition or perspective, next to it.

CourseAvenue fits into the HCM market as a way of moving an organization forward through learning. We provide a means to teach and measure the employees in the organization by providing tools to create, deliver, and analyze education, training and assessment data.

HRIS and LMS

In the beginning, overall HR Technology was fragmented and built on home-grown technologies. The simple act of tracking hire dates, basic personal data, and payroll was difficult. This fundamental problem gave rise to the HRIS (Human Resource Information System) market. Firms in this space grew to handle benefits and payroll processing, along with the core personal data.

The lessons learned from the rise of the HRIS were then applied to corporate education systems. A survey of the market showed that there are hundreds of training courses out there and each content provider tended to have their own tracking system. This soon became in a pretty big problem. To determine what a given employee was trained or certified in, one would have to consolidate data from every proprietary tracking system in the organization. This was far from efficient and had the potential to cause significant problems with regulatory reporting. Solving this business problem gave rise to the learning management system (LMS) marketplace.

With the HRIS applications storing core employee data and the LMS software tracking execution and delivery of training - what about everything else? What about the review process, succession planning, recruiting, compensation management (different from payroll execution)? These "other things" are what make up HCM. Now you see why a term was needed: constantly saying "the other things" was not very helpful!

As an aside, "competencies" are an often debated functional area. "Who owns the competency models?" is a question that often arises. Is it the LMS, HRIS, or HCM application? This question is worthy of paper of its own.

The HCM Umbrella

With the term generally defined, exactly what is under the HCM umbrella will vary by organization. Some organizations have a complete stand-alone performance management system but no consolidated succession planning, compensation or learning systems. In this case, their need or definition of HCM will not include performance management functionality; their "everything else" will be different than another organization that does not have a performance management system in place.

Market-wise, HRIS companies and LMS companies are vying to be complete Human Capital Management suppliers. Where much confusion comes is that the view of HCM will vary from vendor to vendor based on their heritage. So you have two moving parts:

• Company-specific definitions of HCM - The specific model based on what is in place and/or is most important to your business, and
• Vendor-specific definitions - Any given software/solution provider will have their model which will tend to emphasize their strengths.

Even with all of those variables, it is generally agreed that human capital management is an umbrella covering the following areas:

• Recruiting
• Succession planning
• Skills inventory (or "talent management" - essentially "who knows what?")
• Compensation
• Competency Modeling
• Performance Management (reviews, goal management/alignment, etc.)
• Learning Management

Do you need more help sorting this out? Talk to CourseAvenue's consulting partner, Catavo.

Learning Management Systems (LMS)

CourseAvenue is a leader in development eLearning but we often get asked "how do you track who took the course?" For very simple tracking, we offer our CourseAvenue Deliver which provides customers a rudimentary means to track the execution of eLearning. However, we often get the question "is CourseAvenue an LMS?" This sometimes leads to an overall question, "what is an LMS". Read more about Learning Management Systems here.