Next generation of HR technology: Sanjukta Pal

Talent management continues to be the top priority on the CEO Agenda whereas a minority of CEO’s receive comprehensive information about their workforce. While companies have ambitious goals they seem to be oblivious of the fact that for companies to grow, HR should be a strategic business partner.

Technology plays a strategic yet cost-effective role in managing talent by:

• Driving availability of the right person at the right time at the right place and at the right cost

• Implementing an employee engagement model with emphasis on mobile operations, collaboration and social media solutions to facilitate an open dialogue with the internal and external community

• Delivering HR services through multiple models and channels

Technology trends being embraced by HR community are:

• Analytics: Early adapters of workforce planning are graduating from first generation analytics to predictive analytics. The metrics have transitioned from being static to dynamic. Technology can help organizations develop a predictive model based on historical employee data, derive insights based on attrition predictions, predict flight risk probabilities and arrive at focused retention efforts. Technology advancements (Big Data, in-memory computing, natural language processing to name a few) have made it possible to visualize data. Such intuitive and interactive analytics systems have created a broader culture of inquiry and a new breed of ‘Data-Scientists’.

• Wave 2: As HR organizations become strategic and HR frameworks get mature, CHROs are getting increasingly aware of the usability of existing HR systems. From systems which typically covered only the employee database and IR, we see a significant drive to integrate the entire talent management framework.

• Cloud: Adoption of Cloud based systems is driven by pay-as-you-use model, scalability and agility. Affordable technology can integrate HR systems on the intranet with applications like Learning Management System hosted on the Cloud. High impact learning capsules can be pushed to the mobile devices of employees based on individual learning needs. The LMS application then can capture the learning results

With the advent of myriad technology solutions, HR service delivery models and processes have undergone a significant makeover and choosing the right technology is critical. In a world where we are spoilt for choices, making the right choice is a complex task. And the right choice is the one which is aligned to company culture and critical success factors which drive business growth.