Harnessing human potential via new talent science and technologies

At the recent Inforum 2018 technology conference in Washington DC, Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor, which focuses on business software applications for specific industries, said AI, analytic, network, cloud, and industry platforms are now key components of the digital transformation journey.
Infor’s latest focus is how best to harness the human potential using new talent science and technologies to better engage employees, train them and facilitate the human-machine collaboration. Hence, talent management and workforce training have entered the new era in which human potential can be boosted in a big way.
For example, latest findings in behaviour science and talent analysis techniques are applied in the new Human Capital Management (HCM) software to better identify the most suitable candidates for specific jobs which require certain qualifications and traits.
Candidates are required to do tests to evaluate analytical, creative and other qualities to see how suitable they are for specific jobs while there is also a new generation of training methods which can be tailored to meet individuals’ learning styles so they are more effective.
The HCM on human potential also helps facilitate enterprises’ team building effort in a more natural way using talent science analytics in which candidates or existing employees take a comprehensive test of over 100 questions, the responses of which are evaluated by AI and machine-learning programmes to give meaningful managerial insights.
Besides recruitment, the cloud-based specific industry platform can be adopted to cover the whole range of human capital management from training and learning to compensation and other team dynamic factors.
In Thailand, Cas Brentjens, vice president, business consulting for Asia and Pacific, said the retail, healthcare and hospitality industries will benefit from using the latest developments in behaviour science and AI, especially when they need to hire large numbers of workers with the right talents in these sectors.
Brentjens said Thailand’s automotive, logistics, supply chain management, food and beverage industries are among the major customers for Infor’s enterprise software applications.
In terms of human resources, it was previously managed in the traditional way with a limited set of data and standard analytics tools to serve employees.
However, Infor’s Coleman AI changes the HR management by harnessing a more diverse data types from multiple sources, including employee records, past performance, test indicators, job openings, peer feedback and social media data so the new data-driven tools are more effective and precise.
Coleman AI can also cross-reference employee profiles with job openings to match employees to jobs they may not even know were open while advising employees on training and experiential criteria that can better qualify them for advanced positions.
In other words, employees are in charge of their career path, not their boss while management succession plans are not linear any longer.
Thus, there are greater probabilities for employees to stay longer, rather than leaving for promotions offered by other companies. This will save corporate expenses in terms of finding replacements and new training.
According to Marcus Mossberger, another Info executive, the future of work is likely to feature more human-machine collaboration and the new generation of employees need to be more flexible due to the disruptive forces of digital and other technologies.
Third, they will have to do more work on mobile and other devices. Fourth, changes in the workplace are going to be constant while soft skills and other problem-solving skills are becoming more important as robots and other machines play a bigger role in the workplace.
Overall, he said, today’s children are preparing for jobs which are basically unknown today.