Blog: HR Periscope

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), 82 per cent of UK organisations have some form of Human Resources Information System (HRIS) in place.

The key reasons given for introducing an HRIS are:

• Improving the quality of information.
• Reducing the administrative burden.
• Improving speed of information
• Improving flexibility of information
• Improving services to employees.
• Producing HR metrics.

There is, however, a question as to whether or not HRIS meet HR expectations.

My experience is that a lot of the time, they don’t.

Numerous reasons can be given for this, but I would like to highlight two which both relate to planning.

A lot of the time organisations are in a hurry to implement an HR system and therefore they start of by reviewing a few of the systems on the market and make a selection based on the functionality that they see.

Organisations are, however, much better placed to make a decision and to bargain for the system that they need if they start of by taking the time to outline their requirements and categories them under essential and desirable.

This means that when organisations talk to suppliers they will be better placed to ensure that the system meets their specific requirements and where it doesn’t to at least be prepared.

The other area that I would like to highlight relates to system setup. Everyone now knows that garbage in, means garbage out and so everyone places a lot of emphasis on the quality of data to be input to the system.

However, organisations are yet to realise that time needs to be taken to plan the structure of systems in relation to the different data types to be used within the system such as organisation structures, competency frameworks, monitoring data etc.

The planning of data sets and structures means that the system can be setup so that the data can easily be accessed and extracted from the system.

These are just key areas to take account of when developing HRIS. All in all the key message that I would like to give is that the devil is in the detail so plan, plan plan!

Susan Popoola
Conning Towers
Human Resources Consultancy
Leveraging the Power of People

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Labels: E-HR, HR Systems, HRIS

# posted by Susan Popoola @ 00:15 0 Comments