Today’s HR is on a digital journey in which it is both a catalyst and a participant.
Radical changes in the way businesses manage and organize themselves are compelling HR to modernize. Liberated from a role that used to be mostly confined to back-office and administrative tasks, HR is now expected to align itself with overall business strategy, help create a digital workforce and digital workplace, and contribute meaningfully to ROI. It is also acquiring new skills and embracing digital technology to help it deliver innovative solutions that meet the real-time needs of managers as well as multiple generations of employees, most of whom are comfortable in the digital world.
As Deloitte noted in its 2016 Global Human Capital Trends report, HR has made significant progress in employee engagement, culture, analytics and the adoption of cloud-based HR technology in recent years, moving away from its traditional service-provider mentality to become talent, design and employee-experience consultants. That transformation has continued apace over the past year, with Deloitte now reporting that more than half of the companies it surveyed for its 2017 report are redesigning their HR programs to leverage digital and mobile tools, while 41% of HR teams are actively creating mobile apps to deliver HR services and 33% are using some form of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to produce HR solutions.
Choosing the right digital resources is critical to the success of HR modernization. Changes in how businesses organize themselves — shifting from a collection of units often working independently to become a network of connected teams sharing information and feedback — require IT resources that support this. Fortunately, previously separate HR systems and programs housed on internal servers often located in multiple sites can be replaced by cloud-based human capital management (HCM) platforms that bring all of the information and analytics together. These cloud solutions give managers access to actionable insights in near real time and allow employees to get the information they need, including development tools and training materials, whenever they want, on whichever device and channel they prefer.
Don’t assume, however, that these benefits magically appear simply by moving HCM systems to the cloud. A business must have the right organizational structure to handle the increased speed of the cloud and a culture that supports greater collaboration to reap the full rewards. Likewise, it needs a clear vision of what it wants to achieve and a strategy to get there so it can measure progress, effectiveness and ROI. It has to foster maximum uptake among employees and managers by preparing them to adopt the new system and the broader organizational changes that go along with it. It also needs to appoint an in-house cloud champion to make sure people stay on board.
Even if all of these steps are taken, some businesses with legacy HCM systems augmented by substantial customizations may still be reluctant to move to the cloud unless those customizations can be retained, while others may not be comfortable paying monthly subscriptions rather than a one-time investment for a standalone system.
Source: Forbes / Warren Perlman
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