Data ownership models are going to be a hot topic for the next few years as we redefine working relationships and the value of personal data becomes obvious to everyone. The current model, where the employer and the employer alone owns HR data will not cut it going forward. People are going to demand the right to share ownership of some HR data, and it is in the company’s interest to find ways to comply.

What is driving this? Three things.

1. People are working for more and more companies over the course of their career

1. People work on multiple projects both while employed and between full-time jobs

1. Projects frequently combine people from more than one company or employees and freelancers

The result is that information hoarding by companies leads to information loss. And this loss hurts companies as much as employees.

Think about the many people leaving large technology companies like IBM. Historically IBM has done a good job training its people and giving them opportunities to build skills. It has also kept good learning and skills records. Now IBM is reorganizing how it does work. Many people are leaving to go to other companies or to become freelancers. What happens to all these skills and learning records? They are still valuable, to the individual and to the people who want to hire that individual for project work, which could include IBM itself. But they are lost in the black hole of corporate data repositories. And information that cannot be accessed is without value.

Expanding on these themes:

1. People are working for more and more companies over the course of their career

Once upon a time the organization man was loyal to his company and expected to retire from the company he was committed to. That changed a long time ago. Companies abandoned life-time employment in favor of business reengineering, restructuring and flat organizations. And in general this has been a good thing, leading to more agile organizations and giving people more options and flexibility in their careers. In any case, the combination of longer working lives and shorter company lifespans means that no one can expect to work for one company through their whole career. It is getting harder for large companies to survive. The average tenure of a company on the S&P 500 has gone from more than 60 years back in 1958 to less that 20 years today. And life has never been easy for smaller companies. Most people entering the workforce today can expect their career to last longer than the first company they work for.

2. People work on multiple projects both while employed and between full-time jobs

The importance of project work has increased s the continuity provided by full-time employment has weakened. A career is no longer a series of jobs. It is more a series of projects, strung together by shared team members and a growing portfolio of skills. As HR expert Rita Trehan says, “to remain relevant in the workforce of the future focus on skills not jobs.” Companies are not very good at keeping a record of all of the projects a person has worked on. So individuals are going to need to take the lead on this, and keep their own records of what projects they have worked on, who they have worked with, and what skills they have developed and demonstrated.

3. Projects frequently combine people from more than one company or employees and freelancers

One reason that companies struggle to keep and share project records is that so many projects today include people from inside and outside the company.

When a large software system is implemented the team will often include people from the software vendor, a systems integrator, the client and some subject matter experts. But these days the integration of multiple systems is often required so the system is more complex. This makes the keeping and sharing of project records similarly complicated, and the result is that each company’s records are incomplete.

So where do we go?

Individuals are already taking matters into their own hands. Primarily by putting information about projects on social networks like LinkedIn, which has projects as part of the profile. In general, LinkedIn has better and more up –to-date information about employees’ skills than the internal skills management systems. The open approach taken by LinkedIn allows skills descriptions to evolve rapidly in response to changing work conditions. And people appreciate that they will maintain access to their LinkedIn profile after they leave their current company so they are more willing to share information.

There are also some important open source efforts that we will look at in a follow up post. The two that we are tracking closely are OpenPDS from MIT (a project led by Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland) and the Mozilla Foundation’s Open Badges project. At TeamFit we plan to implement both of these approaches.

But companies have legitimate concerns

Companies do have some legitimate reasons for keeping control of skills and learning data.

1. They may be under legal obligation to keep the names of their clients and the details of projects confidential

2. They want to shelter their best people from recruiters or raids by the competition

3. They do not want their competition to know the range of skills they have or are developing

At TeamFit we respect these concerns and protect both the company’s and the individual’s interests. We do this by recognizing that skills and learning data is digital so that more than one person can own it. And that ownership is not absolute. An individual may have the right to see their project records (for the period they worked on the project), even after they have left a company, and to get recognition of the skills they have demonstrated. But the company may still need to keep private the details of projects and clients from the general public.

Managing all this requires a design that respects both sets of interests. And this is what we have built at TeamFit. We will show more of how we do this in future posts, meanwhile you can read our Terms of Service.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

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