With the help of SaaS
(Software-as-a-Service), Mobile, Analytics and other technology innovations,
organizations have started leveraging the “Digital” revolution and adapting to
“Digitalization” at a much faster pace.
When we talk of Digital in HCM, we
need to keep in mind that the Consumerisation of enterprise IT or HR-IT in an
enterprise perspective is still evolving. While companies adapt to SMAC
(Social, Mobile, Analytics & Cloud) faster, a comprehensive Digital HCM is
still in its nascent stages in many of the organizations.
To actually achieve a
comprehensive Digital HCM, there are 3 fundamental prerequisites to achieve
success:
1) Digital HCM Strategy – a clear
understanding and visualization of what and how of the future state of HR-IT
(how the organization wants to leverage its investments in SMAC, beyond the low
hanging Self Service or Anywhere/Anytime, what it wants to provide to its
employees as user experience, how it wants to engage with the employees, how it would like the employees to use it, etc)
2) Milestones - a timeline map of “What”
and “When”- Digital HCM is pervasive across the entire HCM processes and hence
the What and When matter if you want to achieve success. A bits and pieces adaption
without coherency in its theme of digitalization is bound to let you down.
3) Transformation & Innovation – not
merely an acceptance, but a transformational outlook to the entire HR processes
and a mindset to innovate. This is based on a constant feedback that comes from
both user intelligence given by the systems themselves as well as the users.
In the public space, the
applications like Google or Amazon or Facebook that we use, not only provide
user experience in terms of the User Interface (UI), but they are also
intelligent to understand the users and accordingly keep the user experience
richer.
For a successful Digital HCM in
HR-IT, a continuous feedback loop needs to exist to ensure constant innovation
and transformation.
This feedback loop coming out of
the user intelligence is an important piece in public consumer applications. When
applied to enterprise HR-IT, this translates into user analytics as a necessary
component be it from an employee portal or any other Anywhere, Anytime
application functionality.
A simple use case could be user
analytics from a Learning application – when users are provided with a Learning
portal, apart from the usual self-services like enrolling for courses,
approvals and e-learning, the portal should also be used to track and present
choices of learning curriculum / courses based on the job profile of the
employees automatically.
Another option could be to
present users with information on what courses are being actively pursued by
other employees. A tag of “See what your peers are learning” could be a tool to
motivate learning. Another use case is about mobile learning. The business
benefit of “Mobile enabled” or “Wearable enabled HR” is not from
providing an app to approve leave of absence or travel expenses.
These are already being practiced
in many organizations. And this is a step in consumerisation of IT in
enterprises. The consumerisation here is not about pay-per-use but about the
user experience and enhancing it to consumer grade experience similar to a
public consumer application to increase employees’ engagement and connect with
the organization.
The user intelligence is based on
usage pattern over a period of time. Hence we have to understand that the
entire process of actually digitalizing HCM is a journey and not a one-off
exercise. The importance as well as the success of Digital transformation lies
not in migrating to Cloud or mobile enabling. These are not end by themselves.
Digitalisation is a journey and involves continuous innovation as well as
adapting faster to changing paradigms.
The success of a digitalisation
journey for an organization is not based solely on which Cloud product they are
adapting. It is more about use cases of “how to use”. This is invariably where
the HR leaders need to think beyond traditional boundaries and innovate.
Disclaimer: Some of the wordings like Systems of Record / Systems of Innovation etc are reused from already existing materials on the internet. Thanks to those creators.
