Since 2005, when CEO rhetoric "our people are our greatest assets" peaked, senior executives have been demonstrating a more sincere conviction that talent is indeed the only source of differentiation and competitive advantage in knowledge-economy organizations.

Its been only three years since this great shift in mindset. Booming economies, globalization, and an aging workforce throughout most of the world have made access to talent the number one issue in organizations. HR is starting to give way to human capital and talent management, at least as labels. But how much progress is the profession making as a strategic driver of the business? How is HR transforming itself and organizations toward a place where people are viewed as talent and talent is truly managed as the most important competitive lever?

To help answer those questions, HCI and Vurv Technologies launched a survey and research initiative last month to both provide a benchmark for future studies and, most importantly, to gauge the current state of the HR/talent-management profession.

Impatient to analyze the results and to encourage more participation, weve extracted some preliminary findings below. Note that these findings are based on polls of North American managers, directors and VPs of HR (plus a few chief HR/human capital officers and chief talent officers).

Overall, based on preliminary results, which include input from 136 respondents, the news is generally good. In response to our first question: "Who does the head of HR report to in your organization?", a surprising 43% of respondents, across all sizes of companies, said the reporting relationship is to the CEO.

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