A Look Back at the History of Gartner's Coverage of Talent Management Applications (Part 4)

In Part 3, we left off discussing the first vendor evaluation for E-Recruitment.  We made some good calls including:

By 2008, market forces will cause 25 percent of the e-recruitment vendors to go out of business or be acquired (0.7 probability).

I do not know if it is actually 25% and not many went out of business, but many were acquired.  Our vendor evaluation was pretty good as well in retrospect (though some of our Positive and even Strong Positive vendors eventually were acquired).  At that point, we actually published a two for one.  We had a MarketScope focused on Salaried Hiring and one focused on Retail Hourly Hiring.  I think it was a good decision at the time.  However, as we entered 2005, things were definitely changing.  Oracle acquired PeopleSoft.  This event took a lot of time in terms of collaboration with other analysts and working with clients.  I also realized that we had not published a formal definition of the suite and really laid out the forces that were converging at the time to push toward the suite.  The concept of the suite was starting to gain some momentum so in June 2005 we published two notes: "Talent Management Application Suites Can Enhance Workforce Effectiveness" and "Talent Management Application Suites Emerge to Support Strategic HR Capabilities".   struggled at the time with how broad to define the emerging suite.  Should Talent Acquisition be part of the suite?  It was still disconnected in many ways in terms of the plans we heard from clients.  However, someone said something to me, I cannot remember who it was so please feel free to comment if it was you, that really resonated and that was that the interview process should be like someone's first performance evaluation.  That, along with the common competency foundation, convinced me that it should be part of the suite.  Workforce Planning was, and still is, to some extent an outlier.  More on that later.  We did pretty good on the prediction front:

By 2008, buying talent management applications from a TMAS vendor or an HRMS vendor will be customers' standard approach (0.7 probability).

We did a minor update to the MarketScope for E-Recruitment Software in July 2005.  We also did a full refresh of the MarketScope for Employee Performance Management Software in August 2005 (note the new standard name).  Again, we did fairly well, most are still doing quite well or have been acquired because they were a good strategic fit for larger vendor plans.  At that point, I needed to revisit the HRMS research.  I had already converted the Magic Quadrant for Large Enterprise HRMS to a MarketScope in November 2004.  However, I had not done an update the Magic Quadrant for US Midmarket HRMS since early 2004 so I hunkered down and did the update which published in January 2006.  I also published our foundation research on Workforce Planning and Analytics in October 2005 ("Exploit the Next Generation of Workforce Analytics to Manage Human Capital").  In Part 5, changes are afoot to the scope and format of the Talent Management research.