HR Technology in India – Aiming for the sky

HR Technology Solutions have made huge strides in the last couple of years and the strategic HR offerings of the major business software vendors are fairly advanced and cater to the current thought processes in Human Resources. The current focus seems to be on aligning organization objectives to individual goals, talent management, effective service delivery and developing workforce insight.

Indian organizations have seen tremendous growth and workforce transformation over the last two decades. The nature of organizational roles, demographic distribution, compensation structures and the organizational culture have all been through massive changes. To manage the burgeoning workforce, a large number of firms in India have invested in technology solutions. However, most of these systems are characterized by adhoc and incremental application development and roll-out based on situational functional requirements rather than a well thought out HCM strategy. This results in incremental operational efficiency and does not give any real competitive advantage. The current implementations in these organizations are also not able to support the complexity in organization structures and people and talent management practices in the organizations.

The current implementations also fail to fully leverage the capabilities of the packaged solutions. The transactional HR modules are implemented and used to a large extent but the utilization of Strategic HR modules is fairly low. In many cases modules are bought but never deployed. User adoption seems to be a major issue with users not being able to use the system beyond the basic transactions.

The focus of this blog is to discuss the capabilities, challenges and future directions of HR technology and how can it be leveraged for strategic processes such as objective alignment, pay for performance, leadership and talent planning especially from the perspective of Indian organizations. We will bring the academic, practice, solutions and implementation contexts together in our discussions for a better appreciation of the HR technology and its application as a tool for building competitive advantage through people.