I was really pleased with last week's webinar on serious games. The application of game technology and "game mechanics" to human capital management purposes at first seems to be a new and radical departure from conventional practices. However, I think in some sense it represents technology catching up with tried and true training and performance management approaches. The medium of serious games really represents a return to active learning and "learning by doing". This is a far more natural and engaging approach to instruction than the passive, power-point delivered learning experiences that otherwise predominate.

Likewise, serious games and virtual enviroments offer a way to take "competency models" out of documents and system dialog boxes and put them into "3D." Virtual worlds can give employees the opportunity to try, reherse, and refine their competencies in a safe environment. Multiplayer environments can provide transparency across teams and opportunities to learn from both team members and competitors.

Thanks again to the panelists, Randy Brown, Virtual Heroes; Steve Mahaley, Duke Corporate Education; and Karen Sopko, Creative Bandwidth Games

I plan on making a few posts on the topic of "talent management system provisioning." I want to cover the topic at a high-level before focusing on integration of competency content and other details.

Here, I'm using "talent management system" to refer to integrated TM suites as well as discrete TM components, such as performance management, compensation, learning management systems, succession planning, etc. "Provisioning" broadly describes processes for providing systems the data they require before they can be used productively. This data can be thought of as the "inputs" to talent management processes.

There is great variation in requirements around TM system provisioning. Requirements vary based on the particular TM components that an employer has deployed, the degree of built-in integration among components, and the sophistication of the particular employer's TM programs. However, the major categories of data of concern in TM system provisioning are:

• Organizational structures. This includes information describing an organization's sub-entities or "organization units", relationships among organization units and between organizational units and parent entities, the positions within each organizational unit, reporting relationships among positions, and the sometimes identifiers referencing position incumbents.
• Position profiles. A position profile (or sometimes "position competency model") associates a collection of competency and process accountability information with a position. A position profile includes references to individual competencies and to groups of competencies that are associated with a position. For each competency group and individual competency, proficiency levels (required or desired proficiencies) and weightings among competencies/groups can be specified.

I have written in previous posts about how HR services have been influenced and advanced through the incorporation of ideas that grew up outside of the HR field (examples of such influences being customer relationship management, supply-chain management, and business intelligence). Those looking for the next source of big ideas to shape HR and human capital management (HCM) need to keep an eye on the field known as "serious games."

Serious Games Day at IBM

Last week IBM hosted "Serious Games Day" at its software executive briefing center in Research Triangle Park, NC. I came away from the event with an appreciation for the accelerating sophistication of serious games and with a few insights about their increasing relevance to strategic human capital management.

I'll describe some of the games demonstrated at the event, but first I want to zero in on a few of the most salient "take aways" for those in the field of HCM. A sign that it is time for those in the HCM field to take "serious games" seriously is the increasing activity around putting rigorously derived competency content into games (call them "business simulations" if it is more palatable to your management).

Someone just asked me to review what the 3.0 library has related to competencies, so I thought I'd write a post as I'm sure others are interested. I also will offer a related opinion or two based on some discussions at last week's HR-XML Partnering and Integration Summit.

There is quite a lot that is new with respect to competencies in version 3.0. Here is a presentation I delivered back in May that covers this topic. I believe a few field names and other small details have changed in the interim, but that the deck basically covers the motivations for the changes.

Some of the competency-related material within the 3.0 library that you may want to review is briefly reviewed below:

• EPMResult. This is a result sent from an employee performance management system to a relying system (e.g., an LMS or other talent management system). A version of this came out with the 2_5 library. However, this is essentially new since implementations of EPMResult are only just beginning. The EPM result noun has a competency section that allows you to communicate information about groups of competencies, individual competencies, and individual behavioral indicators associated with a competency.