HCM wiki

When the HR blog power rankings were announced a couple of weeks ago, I noted with interest that the 103 blogs being reviewed had been selected as those focusing on ‘HR / Human Capital', probably without much thought as to the difference between these categories, or even whether there is a difference (sorry if I've got this wrong Kris).

There were also a few other things going on in the HCM blogosphere at the time and which had also caught my interest, and which I then started to link together with this HR / Human Capital issue:

1. The importance of having a clear, shared terminology to aid communication and understanding, which had been triggered by Jason Corsello’s poll on what term we should use for the application of analytics, metrics and performance indicators to measuring your workforce.

Therefore, I had already been thinking about posting on my views about human capital management (HCM), and in particular on HCM vs human resource management (HRM).

2. The business use of social media, involving a number of people and their various perspectives in assembling and developing thinking about a subject as opposed to one particular expert communicating their own individual thoughts as in the traditional publishing model.

This then got me thinking about the need for a self-organising and collaborative approach to developing the sort of clarity I believe would be useful in this field.

I had in fact come to more or less this conclusion at the end of my book:

"I think Denise Kingsmill was right in her belief that Accounting for People would lead to further evolution in thinking about HCM. I think it has, and this book is evidence of that. I think thinking will continue, and perhaps one day a definition we can all agree with will emerge."

I just didn't know enough about social media while I was writing my book to realise that this technology provides the ideal basis to enable the sort of conversation I felt was needed.

So the idea that occurred to me is whether I could interest some of the other bloggers in the HR/Human Capital space to contribute to a wiki to agree a couple of definitions for human capital management, talent management etc.

I really don’t know whether this is likely to work and how much interest there will be from others in doing this. After all, most of the other bloggers who I think are in the HCM space don’t even mention HCM within their blogs. (And some who do, I don't think are, if that makes sense!)

Also, even if there is interest, how easy will it be to find agreement between us?

Well, probably not easy, but it should surely be possible? After all, with the exception of George Bush and a few other controversial issues, Wikipedia seems to manage to do this on a much broader basis.

So my hope is that the opportunity to collaborate on a definition of HCM will appeal to some of the other regular bloggers in this area, and that also some of my clients and other contacts will contribute too.

So, I’ve set up a wiki to enable this collaboration. And I've entered some initial thoughts. Please review here, and update with your views:

Or comment here: