Mobile and social are driving the HR technology space across the globe. While HR priorities such as hunt for good talent, grooming talent and making them more productive still remain, the channels to effectively meet them has changed to mobile and social due to the speed of these services.

Mobile and social, however, come with risks. These platforms expose the inner workings of an organization to the outside world and identifying the right amount of exposure is always a debatable point. The amount of flexibility that a company wants to give its employees compared to the amount of control it wants to exercise is always a trade-off.

The concept of “BYOD” (bring-your-own-device) is picking up in companies. While the amount of internet activity on proprietary infrastructure of the company can be monitored, it is virtually impossible to monitor or control what employees are doing through their smart devices. Some companies try hard to restrict employees’ use of social and mobile. Rather, the organization should focus on policies, coaching and culture-building to hedge the risks. On the flip side, employees also need to be careful about what they post about an organization on social platforms because negative connotations about a person’s social profile can be watched and viewed by the employee’s potential future employers.

Analytics will change the world of HR and HR technology in the coming times. While companies are inclined to get more analytical in their approach to human capital management, the real potential of analytics is unlocked when a company’s trends can be benchmarked against the industry or a particular geography. The possibility of such macro-level analytics is getting more real as more companies post their data on the cloud.

Cloud services are known to be secure and more stable than traditional enterprise systems. Through an analytics platform that can aggregate data from various enterprise systems and compare trends across macro-level parameters a company will be able to obtain more real-time and relevant data about its workforce. For example, traditional engagement measurements relied on retrospective point-in-time surveys. Analytics, however, has changed all that by allowing a company to obtain engagement data, which is benchmarked against the industry or geography and in real-time. This is real actionable data a human capital department can employ to course-correct its management approaches. Organizations failing to understand the potential of these trends will likely fall behind the more progressive ones in their ability to manage the changing composition of the workforce.

Choosing a technology service provider is a tricky affair. First and foremost, an organization should be very clear about who are the stakeholders involved in a service evaluation process. Typically, enterprise risks and priorities are reflected by a CXO-level executive better than a team of junior analysts. For important HR technology decisions, it is always advisable to have the CXO on board in the vendor evaluation process.

The first factor step in a vendor evaluation process is the credibility of a vendor. Besides that, it is important to evaluate how the technology service provider’s current and future product plans relate to the organization’s current and future plans. The questions that one needs to ask are “Can we migrate?” or “Can future integration be seamless?” it is also important to assess the long-standing-ness of the service provider besides other risk assessments. Risk analysis can include assessment of where the vendor puts the enterprise data and number of security layers.

In conclusion, changing workforce models in HR will drive the HR technology space in India. The strife between the older generation workforce trying to enforce controls and the younger generation eager to make changes will drive HR technology. Mobile, cloud, and social will continue to remain buzzwords for a while.