By Jennifer Taylor
The role of human resources is changing as HR teams face new pressures. Today, HR is expected to not only provide traditional operational and personnel services, but also better anticipate and respond to strategic business needs. The challenge is staying focused on meeting rapidly changing business requirements using technology that is also in transition.
Our friends over at Workday held a webinar with HR Expert Naomi Lee Bloom, Managing Partner of Bloom & Wallace. During the webinar, Naomi described two ways that organizations approach HR solutions, one of which is whack-a-mole – reacting to business needs as they arise. This methodology leaves little room for business transformation. Instead, she recommended that businesses should be anticipating and responding to HR needs by coming up with a different strategy that plans for the future.
Cloud-based HR solutions introduce new and often easier-to-master capabilities that can help transform HR from a service provider to a corporate advisor. But if HR and IT teams approach these new applications as they did transactional systems of the past, business results will not change. In the same way an educator must approach each student slightly differently to maximize individual performance, HR and IT will need to couple the advancements in these new applications with an integrated systems and process approach to user experience and a renewed focus on change management and user adoption that empowers (not just support) HR teams and the businesses they serve.
We’ve captured many of our thoughts and ideas about this subject matter in a recent whitepaper, “How Cloud-Based Human Capital Management Can Impact Business Results.” These ideas are from real world lessons learned on managing talent in a rapidly changing world, balancing confidentiality with social presence, taking advantage of frequent innovation in a smart way, and many more. Please leave your comments, reactions or responses below. We’re looking forward to discussing this topic in an open forum!
Jennifer Taylor is the vice president of Workday Cloud Services at Appirio. jennifer@appirio.com
