Talent Management - A critical perspective

Managing talent is on top of many business leaders agenda lately. No one can agree more on this topic then the Project managers in IT Service industry. When one starts talking about Talent management several questions arise:

1. What is talent?
2. How can this be sourced?
3. How can this be developed?
4. How can the talent be deployed to meet the demand appropriately?
5. How do we manage the entire talent cycle?

Answering these questions requires one to define the scope and context of the subject under discussion. Lets simplify it by looking at the IT Service industry. For the project managers in IT services, finding the solution for the above question is quintessential for the success of the project/engagement they manage. Not many organizations and their project managers out there found a good solution for the above. Lets look at some of the challenges impairing their ability to find solutions:

A. Difficulty in cleary & consistently defining talent. What do we mean by this? Quiet simply this boils down to knowing what are the capabilities of the resources. The capabilities can be defined given there is base set of factors/parameters pair values standard used to qualify them. To understand this I would draw us all to an analogy of a aircraft which has the capability to transport people, cargo, etc quickly, safely, consistently (in specified time window), and repeatably. The aircraft itself can be different based on the components that go into making them. Ofcourse we know by know there are standards, there are specific components made by differnt companies and when all of them put together make an specific type of aircraft and that aircraft has certain unique capability.
B. Difficulty in clearly & consistently sourcing the defined talent as there is no shared pool of resources that we can draw out from one. In airline industry it is possible to get an aircraft as an outright purchase, wet or dry lease from vendors in the market to manage a certain load in a route. Can we say the same about sourcing talent?
C. Lack of standardization in assets and capabilities to develop talent. We can understand it by appreciating this question: Is it possible to say that every resources going through the same course come out with same level of talent? We know well that Airbus or boing can develop an aircraft in their shop floor with a gaurantee that the end product is of a specific type say A380.
D. Inability to forecast the demand for specific talent. For example not all deploy a SAP FICO/Oracle E-Biz Financials suite in the same way, though the package is the same. This gives rise to different and unique talent required to implement/support/maintain them. However in the airline industry, on e has been able to predict the load factors between any two given cities for operation, thereby making it easy to determine the number of aircrafts/trips to be planned between two cities. Atleast one can manage the economics: demand-supply by varying the ticket prices.
E. Lack of structures and schedules to manage the talent given that the underlying technology/tools are constantly changing in IT services. Even an aircraft has been structured and scheduled for regular preventive/corrective maintenance to keep it in shape and a fixed flying hour after which it is retired. Can we do that for talent?

Come to think of it there are some simle and easy frameworks that we can model, define, create and operate to manage talent. It just requires us to think Out-of-the-box. some of the solution for similar problems already exist. Can we develop a IT tool for the same? Think about it....