Google “office automation” dates back to the 70s and 80s. Before the vocabulary switched to “chips” and “processors,” futurists predicted a world of technology created leisure. The assumption was that, once you made work faster, it would become easier. Noted human resources technology expert Naomi Bloom describes this as extrapolative thinking.
Technology must do more than expedite work.
However, there is no evidence that office technology has fundamentally eased labor, quickened work, or improved productivity. For example, despite the fact that human resources technology makes information instantaneously accessible, the workload may have actually increased because human resources personnel are now multi-tasked and salaried exempt. The value of HRIS does not lie only in its ability to expedite work.
You see, the evolution the futurists predicted as occurring on a straight line has happened in the context of other forces operating synergistically and independently. So much has happened – socially, economically, and managerially – during this 20 to 30-year evolution that technology meant to promise simplicity presents itself as complexity.
It’s all in how you use it
The true value of HRIS lies in how it is strategically implemented and utilized. To paraphrase Naomi Bloom:
- Would a business benefit from doing the work of Human Resources within the organization or buying the results from a third party?
- What are the best mechanisms, sources, terms, and conditions for purchasing the same work done by a third party?
The value of HRIS technology lies not in what it can do so much as in how you use it. In the face of complexity, writes John Hagel III, “we need to expand our focus on innovation beyond the narrow frame of technology and product innovation. If we are to successfully adapt to the escalating complexity of our environment, we need to invest time and energy in exploring institutional innovation [across the organizational silos].”
Strategically used, Human Resources technology – in its management of information, talent, human capital, and performance – can be the central key to managing and exploiting the new and always evolving complexity. And, to play that role, HRIS must contribute to the often unarticulated shift in management culture. It can and must contribute to institutional innovation on a sustaining basis:
- Organizations must decentralize by deferring power and authority to employees. This innovation requires the ability of the organization to view people as performance assets, human capital able to expand growth instead of as a labor burden meant to be eliminated.
- Lifelong learning needs to be put in place, designed and measured to influence aligned performance outcomes, it requires tracking, communication, and facilitation.
- Core strengths must drive all organizational behaviors, so the key performance metric for HR technology lies in its ability to free management to focus on the institutional innovation that matters.
- As business economies and operation processes become socialized and collaborative, the Human Resources technology must facilitate support to the institutional innovation dynamic.
- Human Resources management must dump the traditional models that may have defined and proscribed its clerical behavior for ages.
Grooming HR professionals for institutional innovation
Bill Roberts wrote in SHRM Magazine (2008), “The heart of the HR teaching profession is in the right place, but most professors do not have the knowledge to teach the courses [in HRIS]. Like the HR profession, the HR academic profession has historically attracted people with varying degrees of technophobia.”
Accepting this as a given demands a new focus on the academic and practical preparation of Human Resources personnel.
- Community college experience can prepare entry-level candidates with a thorough background in the core Human Resources issues of compliance and risk management.
- Human Resources Bachelor’s programs should deepen that core knowledge and expand it with practicums in interviewing, crisis management, and problem solving. The academic discipline should be standardized and reflect input from professional standard-bearers such as SHRM.
- Disciplines, such as organizational development, knowledge management, training & development, performance management, strategic HR management, and more, require graduate education that focuses on the discipline as a career path beyond Human Resources generalist positions.
- The assessment and implementation of HRIS and related HR technology will be best served by laser-focused training offered by providers.
Only after HR end-users are trained and experts in technology (systems and operation as well as utilization and potential) will those users be able to find time and resources to contribute to strategic solutions in organization complexity.