Do you have one? Did you know you needed one? Most larger organizations will have a well developed HRIT strategy, some mid sized organizations might have put relatively little thought into theirs preferring (unwittingly) to patch things together as needs came up.
Part of your strategy is the recognition that you have major dependencies on your master HR strategy as well as your HR service delivery strategy. Clearly you cannot have an articulated HRIT strategy if you don’t know what your HR strategy is. How on earth can you know what to do with talent management technologies if you don’t have a talent and workforce plan? Similarly, do you really have a plan for your portal if you haven’t really talked about what your overall employee experience is from all points of contact, whether call center, direct contact, or intranet services?
Your HRIT strategy can consist of visions and choices around several areas, both functional and technical.
- Should you outsource, and if so, how much and what components are appropriate?
- Do you go single source (ERP) on technologies? Or do the best in class solutions seem more attractive? Where do you need best in class technologies and when do you need their functionality? Where do ERP solutions really shine for you in terms of integration, and when is the integration point most important for your organization?
- How do you best deliver these applications to user and customer populations? What’s the appropriate mix of easy, useful, and engaging?
- Are you hosting the application internally? Has your internal IT department given you adequate support, or is HR often sacrificed in favor of operational needs?
At a lower level, your HRIT strategy really consists of putting together a comprehensive and cohesive plan about how your technologies and their interdependencies. You have to know where the technologies interact with each other and plan the process efficiencies that are most important to your organization. It might be perfectly acceptable to have totally manual applicant processing due to highly complex business needs that would have been costly to implement. On the other hand, you might decide that processing and finalizing new hire changes is costing the organization too much and that manager effectiveness at this task will be increased substantially by moving the task to the web. In the end, you’d want to have a vision around how your applicant tracking and new hire processes integrate with manager self service components to add the employee into their jobs, completing the applicant hire process.
We’ll continue the discussion tomorrow…
6 responses to “What’s Your HRIT Strategy?”
Bravo for taking up this important topic. I would add that the place to start is with the organization’s overall strategy/objectives/outcomes/target values for those outcomes. Next comes the HRM strategy/objectives/outcomes/target values for those outcomes. By aligning these two, it becomes fairly obvious what the HRM delivery system needs to be able to do. For example, if a particular type of work and worker is the real linchpin for achieving the organizational strategy, the an obvious place to start with HR technology is with these work roles and workers. If absolute cost of labor is the looming issue, then tackling health care costs will produce much greater lift than will reducing the cost of payroll administration. Where there’s a clear line of sight from organizational strategy through HRM strategy to the HRM delivery system, the business case is built into that line of sight for investments in and the shape of that HRM delivery system. Naomi
Thanks Naomi. I’ll be at this all week.
You make a really interesting point about focusing the HRIT strategy with the talent and workforce management areas. I noted that you’d want to understand the HR strategy and the desired employee experience, and perhaps you are right that these should be further localized to the most strategic segments of the workforce. Certainly we should strive to understand the demographics and preferences that come with a particular set of competencies.
Thank you for beginning this discussion and educating the world about this topic. A few things to think about also during your series:
* Many customers are thinking of switching their core HR system to a new core HR system – basically switching platforms without adding functionality. This will continue HR spirally without delivering strategic value. Lets all focus on areas that make a difference and align the technology to corporate objectives.
* Organizations, even with a focus on talent management, need to have a strong core HR foundation. We need to continue to educate organizations that workflow, web services, roles and security drive the holistic integration of talent management. Just the talent suite alone without the integration bi-directionally will fix a transactional issue but not allow the organization to make strategic decisions about their people data.
* Workforce Intelligence, the ability to measure the impact of talent and human capital in an organization is a combination of measuring what really matters along with a technology strategy in place. Hopefully, one of the reasons that organizations implement technology of this type is to measure, strategize and act upon data and trends/patterns in the workforce. This has to be thought about upfront, not once all pieces in place, to insure that the measures that an organization act upon are able to be obtained.
Great discussion. This will be a fun week.
I recently attended an HR Vendor conference sponsored by one of our large clients. (There were about 70 vendors represented) The day went like this:
– tour of model company facility
– presentation by CFO and CMO (hammered company mission, strategy and execution)
– presentation by EVP HR – articulating HR’s challenge in supporting company mission
– preso by VP OD – producing people to support mission – PM, OD, Succession Planning, etc.
– preso by VP HR Recruiting, training – getting enough people on-board and competent to support mission
– preso by VP HR Services – implementing systems and services (HRIT) to support people and OD and recruiting needs to support company mission
What I like about this – is that everything was seen thru the lens of the overall company vision/mission. This is very similar to the process described in Naomi’s post above.
By the way, I have been in the HR space for 20 years and this is the FIRST HR Vendor/Partner conference I have ever attended.
Tom O’B
[…] Systematic HR: What’s Your HRIT Strategy? “Part of your strategy is the recognition that you have major dependencies on your master HR strategy as well as your HR service delivery strategy. Clearly you cannot have an articulated HRIT strategy if you don’t know what your HR strategy is. How on earth can you know what to do with talent management technologies if you don’t have a talent and workforce plan? Similarly, do you really have a plan for your portal if you haven’t really talked about what your overall employee experience is from all points of contact, whether call center, direct contact, or intranet services?” […]
[…] Read entry at SystematicHR […]