What are some things that you should ask before buying an HR technology solution? What are some necessary capabilities that need to be leveraged? And how should you decide which technologies to have in-house and which ones to outsource? At Converge 2016, Yashwant Mahadik, Executive Vice President and Global CHRO, Sun Pharmaceuticals spoke about some key lessons on HR technology reflecting on his own career in a session titled “Demystifying the myth”. Tracing the journey of early HR systems three decades ago, he pointed to a time when the talk around HR technology revolved on mechanical punching machines about three decades ago, the quality of which depended on whether they could be tampered or not. From there on, facilities, payroll, learning, access management and control have been some processes that are under the purview of HR technology. Today, about 80 -90 percent of the administration of these technologies are taken up by the IT department and 100 percent of the ownership rests on the quality assurance team. While the top most technology solution that organizations use is payroll, the second best bet has been Learning Management Systems (LMS). HR professionals working in different segments of the function would do well to understand the suite of solutions that are available as well as understand the possibilities that the IT infrastructure in place can enable.
The focus of the modern enterprise is on the employee experience that digitization enables, as Josh Bersin notes “Digital isn’t new technology, it is new ways of behaving”. This shift requires HR to think of the various ways in which the function can bring about the necessary cultural change. However, there a few things that HR needs to remember while acquiring new technology.
The success of the use of any technology depends invariably on the impact that it can have on the business. It is important for the HR function to take an active role in assessing or diagnosing a technology solution and also in identifying ways of implementing analytics – whether these are predictive or prescriptive, the impact lies in the translation of the intelligence to strong business metrics.