Chapter I

Introduction:

1.1 Title of the study

1.2 Why this topic was chosen?

Digital technology is continuing to evolve at breakneck speed, and it permeates nearly

every aspect of our working lives. In the coming years, digital will empower people to

take significantly more responsibility for talent management and HR activities. As

digital enables talent management to become less of a centralized HR activity and

more of an activity that is embedded in the fabric of everyday business, it will

fundamentally change HR as we know it.

To investigate the trends and challenges faced by today’s HR executives and their

teams. The findings in this report suggest that HR organizations are slowly beginning

to use digital tools within Talent Management and for increasing knowledge sharing

within their organizations. Further, the HR function appears to be struggling with

service delivery in terms of clear roles and responsibilities both internally in the HR

function but also in the interface with the business. Finally, the report highlights the

perceived insufficiency of HR IT systems.

1.3 Objective

The primary objective of the HR research initiative is to develop insights that can be

useful to both HR and business executives as they seek to maximize the role of HR as

a critical function within the organization. To explore how current business trends

might reshape the nature of the function—in terms of HR’s mission and mandate, the

key activities HR performs, the skill set necessary for HR professionals, the metrics

on which to evaluate HR’s performance, and the organization and governance models

and roles that will most effectively help HR maximize its value to the business. We

also are examining current best practices in HR, as well as some of the obstacles HR

are facing and how those obstacles can be overcome in the future

Low utilization of digital tools in Talent Management

Recruiting, retaining and developing people remains a top focus area for HR across

industries. Succeeding in recruiting and retaining talent rests on the ability to

understand what engages employees and providing opportunities that drive their

development. Few organizations have established best in class digital processes to

interact with current and potential employees in order to strengthen the employer

brand or utilize digital tools in the Learning and Development process, where

organizations are heavily relying on face-to-face classroom training and webinars.

Connecting the workforce

While recognizing the benefits of connected organizations, HR executives experience

challenges in transforming the company culture to promote collaboration and idea

generation through digital tools. A low understanding in the business of the

possibilities and benefits is seen as a major obstacle combined with the lack of

processes needed to fully leverage the capacity of web. A traditional method of idea

generation, predominantly using an assigned development team, is the norm.

HR’s roles and responsibilities

With transformation activities are on the increase in organizations, understanding of

the people agenda renders HR a critical role as a true Business Partner in

transformations. However, HR’s ability to provide support is highly dependent on the

sponsorship of top management. For service delivery, HR executives are continuously

working with the clarification of roles and responsibilities within the HR function as

well as between HR and the business.

Underperforming HR IT systems

There is a view that HR IT system solutions do not deliver sufficiently in around 50%

of the cases. Close to 50% of the participating organisations in the study stated that

they are currently considering changing some, or all, of their HR systems. There is

also a lack of sufficiently integrated features for HR to interact with employees and

enhance the employee experience using web 2.0 and digital tools.

.4 Type of Research and formulation of Research Hypothesis

1.4 Duration of the study and Methodology used

HRM in digital age is a exploratory study & main purpose of the study is to identify

the influence of the technology on the various HR function & understand the

changing trends in HR with respect to technology in different organization.

The data have been collected from Primary source . Case study research method is

used in this paper,Multiple case have been used to show the literal replication of the

various technologies available in the market & used in the different organization. The

main reason behind using research method was to bring in the detail description of the

HR technology used by different organizations, research is one method that excels at

bringing us to an understanding of a complex issue and can add strength to what is

already known through previous research. research emphasizes detailed contextual

analysis of a limited number of events or conditions and their relationships. In this

project also it has helped to identify the actual technology used by HR professionals

in public & private sectors.

1.6 Scope of Study

Organizational culture is considered the main obstacle to digitalization.

The lack of support from the organizational culture is stated as the top reason for why

companies are not using digital media or web tools. As a consequence, almost 50% of

the organizations acknowledge the culture

Aspect as an area to work on in order to increase workforce connectivity, closely

followed by increased understanding in the business of the possibilities and benefits

that such connectivity can generate another reason given for the non-use of web tools

is simply that the organizations do not have access to them.

1.7 Relevance to industry

Impact on the Business

As we have discussed in the context of each of the five IT developments, digital

advances will have significant implications on employees, managers, and leaders

alike. The most important implications include:

• Talent management will become an everyday activity for each employee and

manager.

• The locus of information and decision making will shift to employees—and

away from a central group like HR or a small group of top leaders.

• Digital will knock down silos and blur boundaries—between HR and business

lines, between consumer applications and enterprise applications, between layers in

the organizational hierarchy, between business processes and HR processes, and

between work and personal life.

• Talent management processes will better serve the business—because they’re

customized to an organization’s changing needs and to the employees that work to

make the business a success, and are able to more flexibly adapt to changing business

conditions.

• Talent practices will become more integral to the business’s strategic capability

—because they are data-driven and because talent data is better integrated with an

organization’s business data.

Impact on HR

As digital infuses nearly every aspect of talent management and work itself, it will

transform how HR organizations operate and how they serve the business. It will

impact HR in the following ways:

• Structure and size of the HR function. The HR function may become smaller as

digital more efficiently enables transactional processes and as line managers and

employees adopt consumer-like applications to handle HR processes themselves.

What remains in HR may become more project-oriented and aimed at improving

organizational effectiveness—such as helping to integrate a new acquisition. In

addition, new organizational structures may arise to help HR professionals collaborate

closely with the business and other functions such as IT.

• Core activities of the HR function. HR may start acting like a marketing

organization, by analysing employee data to mine it for insights; creating customized

talent offerings; and marketing, branding and educating employees about talent and

HR processes. Already, in some leading companies, HR analytics groups have been

established whose mission is to analyse data to determine drivers of workforce

performance. HR professionals will also likely take on more of a coaching role,

helping to design cultures, incentives and educational programs to support employees

as they engage in IT-enabled talent processes.

• HR information management and technology roles. As the line continues to blur

between internal and external applications, the role of HR information management

and technology professionals could change. Instead of implementing internal

applications, information technologists specializing in HR and talent management

may be more involved with evaluating external applications and building interfaces

between them and an organization’s own data and systems. In addition, new roles

associated with constantly evaluating new cloud-based software and the impact the

software might have on the business may arise. And as software becomes increasingly

user-friendly and intuitive, HR professionals may configure packaged software

instead of IT experts. Eventually, software and the manipulation of data may become

so user-friendly that employees themselves may even be able to manage their own

data, with only limited involvement from the IT or HR function.

1.8 Limitation of Study

Adapting to change:

Technological development is the greatest event in the recent history of mankind.

Nobody is alien to the great change that has occurred in their environment over the

past few years: the way we work, communicate with friends, colleagues and family;

how we buy, read and seek information; how we care for our health; how we have

fun, play, and more. Every area of our lives has undergone interesting developments

and changes through these new technologies and ultimately, the new digital reality.

Adapting to change has never been easy… How are you coping? Do you have the

guts to try out each new technology? Are you afraid to change your habits? Are you

one of those who carefully study each new device before adopting it? Everyone

approaches technology from different angles and brings it into their lives at different

paces. But regardless of how we are predisposed to change, it is already inevitable. So

in most cases, it is essential to adapt and rethink our way of doing things, while

accepting our limitations and strengths, yet striving to improve daily.

As HR specialists the challenge is even greater: not only will we have to adapt and

continuously re-adapt to new challenges arising every day, but we must also help our

organizations and their people to do the same as nimbly as possible. We have to take

over the reins of the real revolution rocking the foundation of our organization’s

culture, at the same time we must be a stable source of guidance. It becomes quite

apparent that those of us in HR have new responsibilities in this new digital paradigm

shift towards our organizations as well as in shaping labour and educational markets.

1.9 Chapter-wise Summary of the project

Chapter II

Literature Review: About the Core Study

2.1 Basic Concepts and its origin

It has been said that the most important assets of any business walk out the door at the end of

each day (Boxall etal., 2007). Indeed, people and the management of people are increasingly

seen as key elements of competitive advantage (Boxall and Purcell 2003; Pfeffer 1998;

Gratton et al. 2000). Spurred on by increasing competition, fastpaced technological change,

globalization, and other factors, businesses are seeking to understand how one of the last truly

competitive resources, their human resources, can be managed for competitive advantage

(Boxall et al.,2007). Thus, human resource management has grown in its range to the point

where it has become an industry rather than just a simple occupation. According to

Armstrong (2010), the practice of Human Resource Management (HRM) is concerned with

all aspects of how people are employed and managed in organizations. It covers activities

such as: Strategic HRM, Human Capital Management, Knowledge Management,

Organization Development, Resourcing (Human Resource Planning, Recruitment and

Selection, and Talent Management), and Performance Management, Learning and

Development, Reward Management, Employee Relations and Employee Well-Being.

E-HRM / Digital HRM is a way of implementing HR strategies, policies, and practices in

organization through a conscious and direct support of and/or with full use of web-

technology based channels. The e -HRM can range from basic personnel records to

sophisticated networks of sub-systems with definite purposes. Today most of these will be

computer systems. The manpower information system can provide necessary information in a

form which can be integrated with any other business data. With most data base systems,

there are facilities to pull out any of the data and present them in the required form.

In the view of Michael Armstrong (2003) e-HR provides information required to manage HR

processes.´These may be core employee database and payroll systems but can be extended to

include such systems as recruitment, elearning, performance management and reward. The

system may be web-based, enabling access to be remote or online and at any time. The

information provided by the e-HR process can communicated across organizations, if it

posts static data such as information on HR policies and communications about employer

facilities such as learning opportunities and flexible benefits. It can include links that enable

managers and other employees to interface directly with HR applications and make changes

or enquiries. It seems that electronic human resource management (E-HRM) is gaining

importance in today‘s business (Cedar Crestone, 2005) and the use of web-based

technologies for HR practices, policies and processes is enhancing within

organizations.Further, surveys of HR consultants suggest that both the number of

organizations adopting EHRM and the depth of applications within the organizations are

continually increasing (e.g.CedarCrestone, 2005). According to Esen and Erdogmus (2011),

using information and communication technologies in human resource services has

become an important strategy to achieve competitive advantages for organizations. Moreover,

the literature on EHRM suggests that, overall, the three goals of e-HRM are cost reduction,

improving HR services, and improving strategic orientation (Brockbank, 1997; Lepak and

Snell, 1998; Stanton and Coovert, 2004). E-HRM is a way of implementing HR strategies,

policies, and practices in organizations with the full use of webtechnology-

based channels. Thus, E-HRM is the application of information technology for performing

HR activities.Utilizing information technology highlights two aspect of E-HRM; first,

technology integrates and connects people who can be in one room of the organization or in

different countries. Second, information technology supports HR managers by fulfill their

activities (this task fulfillment can be both partially or completely according to

organization‘s strategy and purpose). Similarly, Voermans and vanVeldhoven (2007) defined

E-HRM as the administrative support of the HR function in organizations by using internet

technology. As Zafar (2009) stated, the rise of the knowledge economy is accompanied by a

transformation of the bureaucratic organization into one of the networked types. This

transformation also becomes visible in the relationship between the individual employees and

the organization. To sum up, the chosen statement by Ulrich (1997) tries to show that the e-

component adds a new dimension that ‗rocks the HR boat‘. In other words, E-HRM forces

‗traditional‘ HR professionals to rethink and redefine policies and practices and, indeed, their

own profession (Zafar, 2009).

2.2 Theoretical analysis of the topic

With the increased need for IT in HR and an urgent need to reduce costs in organizations, one

may be tempted to wonder about the possibility of replacing a few, some, or all of the

traditional HR activities through wider use of IT and automation. Although this thought

might be entertained by a few, by no means does collaboration mean replacement. There is

clearly an urgent need for intense collaboration between HR and IT especially given the

significant investments placed separately in labor cost and IT. Companies in India have been

trying to convert their HR services into an array of e-HR functions. On the one hand,

some of them have all their HR functions online through the intranet and, on the other hand,

some companies are revolutionizing with new work patterns such as the virtual teams,

concept of working from home etc There are so many companies which are using different

types of software‘s for different HR functions, but the major problem is that the software‘s

are not user friendly, especially the software for payroll, ESS, & performance appraisal. Most

of the organizations are outsourcing their HR technology because of which they have to

depend on the third party for the smooth functioning of HR activity. Another problem is the

level of automation is not dependent on nature of the industry; it depends upon the intention

of the top management. Still About 60% of the companies have a minimal or no role of IT

enablement in the areas of Policy formulation, Career and Competency management and

enhancing the morale of its employees. The concept behind e-HR is to create an organization

culture that is system and process driven. The future challenges for the organization would be

to enhance the working knowledge of applications of e-HR among the HR practitioner

without which e-HR cannot add value to business

Observing shifting demographics in the workforce in combination with a business landscape

that is becoming more and more borderless, both geographically and organizationally. There

is an on-going digital transformation, which is bringing new challenges and opportunities for

businesses as well as for the HR function. Through the use of digital media and platforms,

organizations have the possibility to generate and collect enormous amounts of data, but are

running the risk of information overload. With this background, in combination

With the HR barometer survey results, it is expected that leading high performing

organizations will focus on the following topics going forward:

Adding digital practices to the Talent Management agenda:

In today’s society, employees demand a balance between business needs, social needs and

their individual needs, and there is a rising demand for personalization, while the workforce

is used to socially integrated, advanced tools and ways to communicate outside of work, they

will increasingly demand this in their day-to-day operations. It will become increasingly

important not to lag behind as an employer in this respect. Improving the employee

experience is a critical ingredient to attract, develop and retain the best talent.

Using collective knowledge to drive business development and facilitate decision-making:

Knowledge is a competitive advantage and harnessing the collective knowledge of the work

force demands improved collaboration and innovation techniques. In a competitive

environment organizations need to take advantage of knowledge and idea spread throughout

The organization and find new ways to collaborate in order to secure internal efficiency and

boost innovation. Such a collaborative environment needs to be driven by top management

and anchored in the business. The implementation of digital tools and culture change to

embrace this enhanced way of working is considered a prerequisite for achieving a truly

connected organization.

Further adapt HR IT to secure efficient service delivery:

Few HR executives consider their current HR systems as sufficient. The rising demand for

SaaS solutions suggests that HR functions require more advanced technology, combined with

the flexibility of on-going updates. These topics bring new challenges to HR’s agenda.

2.3 Identification of the project from the study

Digital is fundamentally changing the way businesses and governments operate—from how

they interact with customers, citizens and suppliers, to how they manage their employees.

New digital technologies enable not only greater integration and flexibility than ever before,

but also the ability for employees to have a greater share of voice and ability to participate in

defining and even creating their own work experiences. Digital is thus poised to radically

disrupt HR as usual and redefine the future of the human resources function in the next

decade. Eventually, HR and talent processes and the technology that enables them will no

longer constitute their own domain or even be primarily performed by a central HR function.

Rather, many aspects of HR and talent management will become fully embedded in how

work gets done throughout an organization, thereby becoming an everyday part of doing

business. HR departments that ignore this transformation could face obsolescence.

In this point of view, we explore five recent digital developments that we believe will

conspire to transform HR:

• Data and integration will be king.

• Digital will give power—and people management—to the people.

• Consumer applications will find a home in the enterprise.

• Digital will enable customized talent management.

• Cloud computing will enable new flexibility and agility.

Data and Integration Will Be King. Analytics—the use of data to produce business-

relevant insights that lead to action—has been heralded as the new step change for HR. Yet

few HR organizations have a robust analytic capability. Collecting data on employees (such

as engagement rates) can be expensive and time consuming; new technologies like Culture

amp’s Murmur promise to make this easier by enabling HR professionals to offer different

employees a ten minute or less online “pulse" survey every day to provide a real-time view of

engagement that is not possible with traditional, annual surveys.

Moreover, companies have found it difficult to gather clean, consistent and integrated data.

But service-oriented architecture, data analytics, master data management (MDM) of HR data

technology and industry consolidation will help companies surmount these challenges. Such

developments can unify talent management applications and enable companies to integrate

data from transactional systems with business data and HR data in a single database. In

addition, data on contingent workers can now also be more easily integrated into a single

system to give employers a more complete view of all of the workers—employees and

contingent workers alike—who are working to create value for an organization. With these

changes, and as analytic capabilities increasingly get embedded into software, the dream of a

data-driven HR function may finally become a reality—if HR professionals can keep pace.

Eventually, the lines between business and people management systems may blur, wiping

away functional silos within HR and even the silo of HR itself. For example, better

integration may fundamentally change the role of professionals in HR Centres of Excellence.

Typically, professionals in these roles are organizationally divided by functions such as

recruiting, compensation and benefits, training and development, and career development.

But when information systems help enable talent management to become truly integrated

across processes, rigid functional boundaries between talent management processes may no

longer continue to make sense.

And it won’t stop there. As mobility applications develop and people spend more of their

work and personal time on technology platforms, they will leave an ever larger digital trail of

information that can be tracked, integrated, and analysed as well. Already, enterprises like

Google Inc. are analysing a wide array of data on people’s lives (such as whether someone

has set a world record or what magazines someone subscribes to) to create statistically valid

predictors of performance at work.1 For example, Google has determined through

quantitative analysis that ability to take initiative is a far better predictor of high performance

on the job than stellar academic records from prestigious schools.2 Success Factors, an SAP

company, tracks employees’ searches of external blogs or podcasts to show executives how

and what employees are learning.3 And it is now possible for benefits information to be

provided to individuals based on their physical location as determined from the GPS system

embedded in a person’s mobile device. In the future, companies will integrate traditional

business and talent data with Big Data obtained from social and local data sources—tweets,

blog posts, RSS feeds, customer service feedback, GPS coordinates and more—to get a

complete picture of their workforce’s abilities, wants and needs.

Data and the insights it yields may eventually trump processes in terms of relative

importance. The ability to statistically determine the key drivers of performance and

productivity for particular workforce micro-segments based on hard data, for example, may

become much more important than generalized rewards, development, or learning processes

Designed to support the entire employee population. Imagine a world, for example, in which

an organization could:

• Simulate talent requirements based on fluctuations in business demand.

• Automatically identify talent gaps and determine how best to close them (for example,

through build, buy or make).

• Offer suggestions for advancement based on a person’s digital work trail.

• Identify top-performing individuals’ and teams’ key characteristics and then mine data on

passive candidates found in digitized global talent pools to find people with similar

characteristics.

• Combine data on worker productivity with data on variables such as time an employee

spends in and out of the office, vacation time taken, or medical costs to identify employees at

risk for health problems or burnout.

Analytics could make HR the strategic powerhouse it was meant to be—by positioning it to

move from historical analysis (understanding what happened) to predictive analysis

(forecasting what’s going to happen and what talent levers HR must pull to improve business

performance). But to make this move, HR practitioners will need to develop robust analytics

skills. They will also have to learn the language of business so they can integrate HR data

with other business data to produce actionable insights. New roles and groups within HR may

arise, such as talent data analysts or people insight units.

Digital Will Give Power—and People Management—to the People. As digital technology

advances, it’s helping companies embed talent management into the fabric of everyday

business and into employees’ work and personal lives. Technology advances are enabling HR

to put the “human” back into human resources, and helping give people management back to

the people.

We’re not talking about the traditional notion of self-service here, or the ability for

employees to perform mundane administrative HR activities themselves, like updating their

address or viewing a pay check without HR’s intervention. Instead, we’re talking about

involving employees and managers in high-impact talent processes—including recruiting,

hiring, succession planning, learning and shaping career paths. All this will happen thanks to

an emerging class of social and market-based tools that will let employees manage almost

every aspect of their professional lives digitally.

For example, in the section above, we saw how talent management practices and data are

becoming more integrated with general business practices and business data to drive strategic

decisions about talent. As this development unfolds, line managers will be more likely to

engage in critical talent processes like workforce planning—using data to determine gaps

between workforce projections and available supply of staff, and modelling different

scenarios that could be used to close any gaps. In addition, managers and employees will

shoulder more talent management

Responsibilities. Take salesforce.com’s work.com, an information system that lets workers

and managers give feedback and recognition for jobs well done on an on-going basis.

Work.com is integrated with salesforce.com’s CRM solution, so a salesperson looking at

accounts in the CRM system could send performance feedback to a customer service

representative without having to change applications—thereby enabling users to fluidly

interact with the tool where they do work every day.4

Likewise, as mobility applications designed for tablets and smart phones become ever more

user-friendly, and as intuitive user interfaces finally permeate talent management software

following the success of consumer-oriented technologies, employees will be more inclined to

adopt IT-enabled talent processes as well. Consider TouchBase, for example, a wall-dockable

tablet that takes a digital photo of each worker to verify the worker’s identity instead of

requiring workers to punch in to time clocks. Or consider new technology that is being

developed that will let workers open a talent management application on a laptop and then

work seamlessly in that same application throughout the day on other devices. Although

mobile HR and talent management applications have well permeated recruiting, time and

attendance, employee relations, and learning areas, mobile applications are being developed

And rapidly adopted for nearly every process to make it easier to perform these activities

anywhere, anytime, and on any device—including talent analytics, performance management,

and leadership development. Technology companies like SAP are now designing apps with a

"mobile first" approach, promising to make mobility far easier than ever before for nearly

every talent and HR practice.

Finally, the infusion of all things social into talent management—and the infusion of

principles derived from gaming as well—will further weave talent management into the very

fabric of employees’ everyday work lives. Already, employees can learn together through

corporate versions of Facebook or YouTube in addition to centrally mandated training

curricula. Companies can also use technology to draw on an employee’s social networks to

target and recruit new hires with the right skills for an open position. Moreover, workers can

use social media to advise career counsellors how best to counsel them, instead of having HR

provide this advice. Sites like Mixtent, GILD, and True Office can also help companies

transform everything from recruiting to performance appraisals to learning into a game. New

site Knack, for example, uses a game format to help workers discover their "knack"—their

unique combination of strengths, talents, abilities, personality traits, likes and preferences.

The site can be used by companies to help identify high performers for recruiting purposes

It combines gaming, analytics, and the application of behavioural insights from science. (For

more on gaming, see sidebar on page 8: “Changing the HR Game: How Serious Games and

Gamification Are Disrupting Human Resources”). We expect innovations to keep arising in

this space, as start-ups take off and as talent management software companies continue to

layer social and gaming functionality onto their existing offerings. Eventually, new social,

gaming and mobile capabilities may replace traditional talent management practices, as well

as time-honoured HR tools such as employee surveys and e-mail communications.

Eventually, advances in digital will not only empower the line to take much more

responsibility for talent management, but they may even shift the locus of information and

decision making from a central group like HR or a small group of top leaders to employees

themselves. Social media could take HR as a middleman out of the picture, for example, by

enabling the following:

• Employees to define their own compensation in reverse talent auctions.

• Employees to negotiate scheduling changes with one another on shift-swapping sites.

• Benefits choices to be determined by consensus through analysis of corporate social media

sites revealing which benefits are important to which employee populations.

• Managers to analyse Big Data from sources like blogs, social networking sites and other

online forums to determine what employees need and want and to find new employees.

Talent exchanges where workers and hiring managers can find each other without the help of

an intermediary through matching of open opportunities with an analysis of individuals’ skills

or past performance and interest profiles; or exchanges that act like stock markets, where the

value of each individual worker is determined by the crowd in a quantifiable and searchable

way for sourcing purposes.

• Workers to define their own career paths by seeing each other have customized career paths

(through sites that mine transfer and promotion histories) and network with them.

• New leaders or successors to be selected in part through opinion polling by those most

affected by the decision.

In this future, the administrative burden that HR departments currently carry may lighten up

considerably. Not only will technology continue to automate transactional HR processes like

benefits administration, but it will continue to enable more strategic practices like many of

those described above to be performed by employees. Technology could then free HR

professionals so they can focus on other work such as analytics. As a result, the group

primarily responsible for HR processes and transactions—whether a shared services

organization, a business services group or an outsourcing partner—may shrink to a fraction of

what it is today. Employees may even manage their own data, and HR data and transactions

may become the sole responsibility of the business with the

2.4 Other outcomes of the survey / literature review

For years, the human resources function has shouldered much of the responsibility for

managing people, in a largely segregated operation. Technology advances will change all

this, by integrating talent management into the fabric of everyday business. HR IT will thus

become a vital component of organizational performance in an increasingly competitive and

fast-changing world. As HR heads toward a future characterized by Big Data, integration,

mobility, social media, gamification, and cloud computing, the ability for organizations to

manage their people will grow more flexible, agile and customized.