The dynamic business landscape today demands HR to align its systems, processes and strategy to the business goals of the organization. Thus, it is no wonder that the HR departments in organizations are moving towards leveraging technology for managing talent. Gone are the days when different elements of employee lifecycle were treated independently. Today, the trend is to look at an integrated talent management approach as well as technology in order to drive the desired efficiencies and effectiveness.

HR departments are striving to create an integrated talent management system that closely brings together different elements of managing talent like attraction, recruitment, on-boarding, performance management, learning, compensation, succession and retention. A closely integrated system provides a deep insight to the business leaders and helps the organization become agile. From a macro perspective, it helps define the talent gaps with respect to the current and future business needs of the organization and creates and executes a strategy to close the talent gaps. In other words, it facilitates the exchange of talent supply with the business demand. From a micro perspective, it helps the employees plan their career in the organization and work towards it.

In the dynamic business world today, it is all about time: at times, timing of the decision is more critical than the decision itself. Through integrated talent management approach and technology, HR departments can bring the desired predictability and proactiveness in talent related decision making.

HR technology has come a long way. Over the years, it has progressively moved from PC-based technology to web-based technology. The advances in technology have helped the HR department move from a pure custodian of people-related information to a service provider. In today’s world, the HR department adds value to the organization by being a strategic partner to the business. This trend is only going to intensify. Transactional activities are already available through employee and manager self-service. Increasingly, leaders will have easy access to strategic inputs related to people, which in turn would make the organization agile. HR would continue to leverage technology to build and sustain its role as a strategic partner.

One of the key factors considered by us while selecting a vendor is the ease of integration with the enterprise wide system. Since, SAP was a well established and accepted system in the organization; it was a natural choice for us. Elements like ease of use, simplicity and visibility were ensured during the implementation stage. The one critical measure of effectiveness for us is to determine how well the technology is enabling the HR team to become a strategic partner to the business.