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The intersection between HR strategy and HR technology

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What is HRIS?

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I’ve been exposed to a lot of HRIS organizations over the years, and some of them are great while others  seem to underperform to me.  They all seem do to roughly the same things, but they seem to have varying degrees of effectiveness.  My thought is that while the basic tasks are the same, there is an underlying philosophical position that either exists or does not – and it’s this philosophical position that determines if an HRIS function is a great one or not.

The basic functions are pretty clear:  HRIS often facilitates analytics, records functional requirements, leads technical vendor selections, implementations and upgrades, etc.  I’m going to suggest that while most HRIS organizations do most of these functions and more, some might exclude a bit here and there, and so there isn’t total consistency across HRIS functions, which is ok.

The philosophical position that sometimes exists and sometimes does not, is less about task and more about belief.  HRIS is about understanding what happens when HR executes programs and how these things impact data.  Along with this understanding comes a completely different set of activities than those above.  Rather than being responsive, HRIS becomes an advocate for the enablement of HR’s future strategies: data governance, technology road maps, creating data quality are all keys to how HRIS will push forward technology rather than simply responding to the complains about how awful it is.

HRIS does not just take care of our technologies and help us understand data.  They should be the stewards of data as we create business process transactions in the entire HR environment.  They should understand that engineering processes in a particular way will drive higher data quality, and infuse these principles into all of our functional process mapping activities.  HRIS should anticipate needs from HR strategy and be among the first to understand how those strategies can be enabled with data and technology tools.

When HRIS understands that they are about how the functional is tied data, we become more action oriented than response oriented.  We often mistake HRIS as an organization that makes connections between the technologies when in fact it’s about connections between technology and function.

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2 responses to “What is HRIS?”

  1. Lexy Martin Avatar

    I think about these things too. From the perspective of the CedarCrestone HR Systems Survey, I’ve seen this roadmap that organizations follow with their HR technologies. See http://www.cedarcrestone.com/annual_survey.php to download the recent white paper and look at the Blueprint. It seems like HRIS follows that roadmap of technology adoption but what’s really important is that those technologies not only support function, as you say, but that they provide strategic value. With our latest survey results, seems to me that some organizations, if not entire industry sectors are finally getting there!

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