Article: Choosing the Right Platform

Technology

Choosing the Right Platform

Prioritize your own processes instead of a product/system prescribing what the company should follow
Choosing the Right Platform
 

People management in India is still developing towards international practices; therefore the adoption of technology to support people management practices is still developing

 

When it comes to adoption of HR technology, cracking traditional industries is still a big struggle. Though the service sector, especially the IT service sector, is a quick learner, most industries still tend to look at HR as a benefit and payroll department. As people management in India is still growing when compared to international standards, the adoption of technology is also gradual.

Companies, which are expanding their footprints in the global market, are the ones who feel the urgency to adopt modern technology platforms because they are attuned to global practices and are seeing the benefits to their productivity, efficiency and costs. However, even in IT, most of the companies have tried to do this in parts only.

There aren’t many large scale implementations of even established products such as SAP in India. However, there is a noticeable increase in demand to adopt SaaS based systems over the last couple of years. The effect of platforms such as SaaS on productivity is huge.

Through a calculation for one of our clients, we found that the ROI for adopting technology can be as high as 800 per cent. Adoption of technology is something that is unavoidable, sooner or later every company that wants to sustain in the long run will need to embrace this fact.

The question is how soon can this be implemented? The onus for this also lies with HR departments. HR managers need to push the case for integrated process management using technology as their main platform.

HR is still considered to be a cost center to a company. This perception needs to be changed by demonstrating that HR can actually be a productivity and profit center by introducing these enhancements to processes. Platforms, which when successfully implemented, will save huge number of working hours for everyone.

The apprehension about the total cost of ownership can be addressed with the right information. HR on the Cloud is enabling new solutions; with its help you can go from heavy capital intensive systems such as SAP to quite nimble and low-budget systems.

How prompt a company is in adapting to technology often depends on the generation that is leading the change process in the organization. Processes that are led by younger generation are more tuned to adopting systems based approach to management. Older generation tend to rely more on human analysis, people perspective etc. While we cannot ignore the human perspective, the fact is that the size of data for analysis is constantly growing. Organizations need to adopt sophisticated platforms to enable quicker analysis and accurate decision making.

Choosing the right HR platform

Choosing just any technology won’t work. The most critical part is to first finalize the HR process internally by engaging all stakeholders. Only once the processes are defined with complete ownership of the stakeholders, the hunt for the right platform should commence.

The right platform for a company is the one, which fits the most of its processes as is or could be tailored by the users themselves to adopt the company’s processes. If you start changing your processes to suit a system, which happens often with traditional products, it will lead to unintended chaos. A platform that can be tailored according to a company’s need without any additional cost of ownership is the best fit.

The right technology increases employee engagement

When you design systems to suit the company’s processes, which the employees have come up with, there is more commitment and engagement to make this work. This facilitates successful implementation of such platforms as well. For instance, one of our products, Kolmè, is designed entirely keeping such requirements in mind. It provides flexibility to build processes for each business unit without having to go through the struggle to standardize on one process for the whole organization.

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Topics: Technology, #ExpertViews

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