systematicHR

Computer Economics does a survey about the TCO of IT support for ERP applications.  While the executive summary is almost totally useless, it’s obvious that in HR, HRIS support and HR dedicated IT support is almost always understaffed and under budgeted.  While you can purchase the survey if you want (I obviously have not – any survey that starts with “ERP systems are now gaining popularity in many different industry sectors as the advantages of integrated systems become apparent” AND was published in April, 2008 is a bit suspect to me – they are only a decade late at this realization).

At any rate, HRIT often gets only shared data center resources that might consist of a DBA and shared applications engineers who actually focus on SCM, CRM or Finance applications and manage HR applications because someone has to.  They usually have a low level of HR knowledge, and count on HRIS to help them navigate the functional HR users.  The problem with this is that HRIS is also often understaffed.  Usually, they are simply a few business analysts and perhaps if lucky, some coders who can program customizations in the core application.

What is usually missing is the vendor managers for outsourced applications, but would be responsible for ensuring that the applications are up to date, responding to business needs, and SLA’s are met.  Also often missing are security managers that also may look into data privacy issues in terms of security and data transmissions across borders.  Dedicated report writers, especially for organizations who have multi-dimensional capabilities is also critical, but often organizations think that their employees who are already trained in ad hoc report authoring are going to be sufficient.  Indeed, these roles all require a high degree of specialization and can’t be generalized into a standard HRIS business analyst.  Is it truly that these positions are missing?  Absolutely.  Our business analysts usually just try to fill in the role of “do it all” employee which doesn’t allow them to specialize enough to be great at what they do, nor does it allow them to fully translate business requirements and convert them into proper solutions.

Success of application implementations ultimately depends on the resultant service delivery, and short staffed HRIT and HR focused IT is a critical shortfall in most organizations.  When initially budgeting for an implementation, it’s truly critical to look far ahead into the future and get the funding for new roles at the outset when the probability is high that you’ll get the support you will need.