Most of the organizations in India which decide to go for an HR technology implementation actually have fairly low expectations from their implementations. This might sound a little paradoxical in the context of most of the system integrators complaining that Indian clients are very difficult to handle and the large number of implementations hitting the rough weather. Nonetheless, this is true.
The expectation from most of the organizations is primarily to consolidate the workforce data in a centralized system and automate the core operational processes. This gives them a basic insight into the workforce in terms of headcounts, reporting structures etc and help them increase HR department’s productivity by taking away the high load of manual record keeping and processing in functions such as onboarding, transfers, payroll and exit. At best the system is used to decentralize service delivery through self service access for employees and managers to manage essential functions such as leave, time and appraisals. Beyond this , there is no expectation whatsoever from the technology solution to help in objective alignment, workforce profiling, talent and leadership development , measuring effectiveness, managing employee and alumni relationships and attracting the best talent available out there in a competitive job market.
This lowering of expectations could be due to a number of reasons. The first and foremost remains the lack of appreciation within the HR community that a technology based solution can be used to drive the aforementioned strategic initiatives. This lack of appreciation and comfort results in them never demanding these functionalities from the implementers. Moreover, very often organizations are not ready as the organizational processes have not reached the right level of maturity for these initiatives to kick in.
The other important reason is that the implementers or IT consultants themselves are not aware of these practices and advanced system know-how to implement them. The fact remains that most of the HCM IT consultants do not have an academic or professional background in Human Resources and do not have a grounding in these practice areas, The other related issue is that best resources in the Indian IT companies are not deployed on Indian projects as the consultants themselves prefer working in overseas locations and projects.
Indian organizations very often rely on the management consulting firms to define their strategic human resource initiatives and processes. However, this group of strategic HR consultants hardly ever go down to the system level or even discuss the possibility of using the HR technology solutions to drive these processes and initiatives.
As a result, the bar for HR technology initiatives is kept quiet low. This means that organizations take an easy route of automating their current or as-is processes, thereby taking a stringent stance against any work around, reengineering or best practices. This results in the solution to go through massive customization which is generally welcomed by the system integrators as customization is easier to achieve using the rookie resources who are well versed in programming and also provides a higher revenue stream than what is called a vanilla implementation. The higher level of customizations means that application of product fixes and future upgrades become very complex, risky and costly which in turn forces the customers to stick to the old release of the solution and not able to leverage the new advances and enhancement in the solution.
This vicious cycle coupled with the governance issues during the implementation ensure that the solutions fail to achieve the higher level of maturity and value addition for the organizations. Therefore, most important need for the organizations is to raise their expectations from their HR technology implementation and demand more rather than less.
More on this in future posts.
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8 months ago
Completely agree with your thoughts here. HR IT in India seems to be looking for automation of a few critical functions. When Excel gets too bulky, its time to automate. But automate the way I want and not what some "world class ERP says is industry best practice". This brings us to the next important question - is there a case for big ticket ERP solutions (SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft) in Indian HR context ? Is technology the solution to ills faced by HR in India ?
ReplyDeletePrashant
ReplyDeleteThe sad part is hardly any big guys (read PS, SAP) have any India specific solutions. For e.g. one very standard feature lacking is leave and time management which is very different from other countries.
Trying to thrust what is US specific to an Indian scenario is not going to work. Worse it leads to rejection of the product.
There are numerous such scenarios, while there may be specific solutions from niche vendors, a real integrated HR solution for India, seems distant.
My submission is that current solutions in the market do cater to majority of requirements. There could be some gaps but the challenge is whether we as HR pracioners and consultants understand the functional depth of the solution and know how to use it strategically. As for your question, I firmly believe that technology has a huge role to play in Indian organizations given that majority of the them are hiring knowlege workers and the headcount is constantly growing.
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