Managing the complex processes of building and sustaining a competitive workforce will become just as important as managing Financial Capital. With employee costs often exceeding 40 percent of corporate expense (even higher in professional services firms), it is essential that companies maximize their return on human capital investment, says Craig Symons, Giga Information Group. The most critical vignette of information that needs to be contextualized against the above quote is that, the financial capital and human capital are interlinked by the common assumptions of planning for growth and therefore mutually serve each other. The danger with misinterpreting the statement would be to take a unidimensional view of cost alone; where the human element of an enterprise strategy is viewed as cost and not asset. The theory of Economics defines clearly that costs are characterized as overheads, while assets are mechanisms of growth and revenue. This document attempts to articulate the process of human capital management from the perspective of enhancing assets for performance.

HCM should not turn into another pitch for a software implementation where the true impact of processes and culture will be left behind, as no one has the time to address the why of performance because resources are being deployed for covering the gaping holes in the software asphalt that has just been laid. Make no mistake; software and technology are an integral part of enriching and enhancing a Business Process. However, they are not the process itself and they do not address the culture issues from a solution perspective. They only create more problems for an organizational culture. This document also attempts to present an objective assessment of the problems in not addressing the Human Capital Management as a co-joined organizational support process.

This document aims to address the process issues and the cultural issues associated with the implementation of the Human Capital Management. There are tons of software that can be made to work to achieve the desired workflow, dataflow and information flow. It is also important to achieve uniformity in the treatment of processes spanning across an enterprise; be it geographically, vertically or operationally dispersed. 

In a recent article in the Financial Times, Thomas Malone Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management writes: We are in the early stages of a profound increase in human freedom in business that might, in the long run, be as important for businesses as the change to democracies was for governments. It is in this context that the discussion on Human Capital Management becomes all the more important and relevant. Where the discussion is centered on how an organization can have the right talent and not just a body count. It is pertinent to therefore that the talent is recruited to execute its strategies rapidly without the downtime of learning curve and the organization also gains the loyalty and commitment for repetitive organizational competitive differentiation. This document takes a compassionate view of engagement between Individuals and Organizations serving each others cause continuously. The following Illustration 1 is depicts the sub-processes of the Human Capital Management Process demonstrating through the value of interaction with the process participants.

The outcome and impact of outputs on the organization and individuals from the above delineated sub-processes would be as follows: 

Resourcing Strategy: This output from the Planning Process would dictate the recruitment of internal / external talent based on roles and accountabilities, rather than head count. Therefore, it would be an element of the organizational strategy with adequate support of budgetary allocation for promoting or training internal talent or recruiting external talent.