I’ve been thinking that HRIS is given too tactical a role in most organizations. This is not based on any real metric or survey, but just a gut feel from organizations I’ve visited over the last half decade or so. Over the next couple weeks, I think I’d like to explore the opportunities for creating a more strategically focused HRIS organization and what this means.
First, let me define what I generally find in HRIS departments (not always). HRIS departments are simply organizations that provide technical support to HR and related functions (such as payroll). The technical support could be in the form of report writing, defining and implementing customizations, working with vendors on upgrades, and maintaining data in general. Honestly, I simply don’t think this is all that HRIS should be doing.
HRIS has the opportunity to provide much more strategic support to the HR organization. Instead of simply creating requested reports, HRIS should really be sitting with HR leaders in strategy meetings and understanding what those strategies and key tactics are that are being deployed. Im most organizations, HR leaders are not the ones that are incredibly familiar with the HR databases or the information in them. Similarly, HRIS staff almost never seem to be included in strategic direction making. The gap leads to a situation where HR leaders simply request data and HRIS produces what’s asked for. This model is not only inefficient, it produces poor results for the processes being looked at.
Good HRIS analysts are able to effectively look at business tactics and understand what data and metrics are needed to support them. Since the HRIS staff is most familiar with the databases, they should be the ones who are able to see the most possibilities in terms of what’s available, but also they should identify ane nuances that might escape an HR leader. Where HRIS wants to go is to have HRIS analysts that have the business understanding as well as a healthy knowledge of data available. The melding of these 2 sources will create a more effective data gatheris as HR leaders look for decision support.
So until next week, ask yourself how involved your HRIS staff is with decision support. Are they active contributors, or simply report writers?
4 responses to “The Role of HRIS – Part 1”
his anti-Sumser rant came too soon for the nominations. I would have had no choice but to give him the award last week. He sooo premature. Double Dubs dishes out regular portions of meat at SystematicHR. This week’s menu included two gems: TheRole of HRIS – Part 1 and HR Technology Does Not Make Us Strategic. -“As we have talked about strategy and HR technology, we need to recognize that great HR technology does indeed get us to a place where we can focus on strategy. The problem is that technology projects
of key business metrics to end users (generally managers). Modeling – Allows users to do a “what if” on data. So if the base of BI is ad hoc reporting, what does that get us? Well, not much to be honest. As I stated in a previous article,the role of HRIS, the HR organization needs to play a bigger part in decision support. While Ad Hoc is nice, it really only gives us a current snapshot of the organization and must be heavily manipulated to provide any realy value. To provide real decision support,
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