Introduction

Deploying HR Technology solutions is an intricate performance. Consider for a minute a juggling act performed by an individual, his or her success depends on their individual skill and focus. Including another juggler in the act adds a layer of complexity which emanates from the coordination that is required in addition to the skills and focus of each juggler.

A HR Technology deployment is an act that involves multiple teams, multiple individuals with varied skills and skill levels, each of whom will need to contribute to the effort through their knowledge, skills, and focus. While the endeavor is to model our approach after successes, lessons are best learnt from failures.

The topic at hand is a vast and is hence conceived as a series of articles. The intent of this series is not to point fingers at any team or profession, but to create an awareness to mind the gaps in execution.

To start off, we set the context for our exploration and provide an insight into the various teams involved in an initiative and their high-level responsibilities.

Why is Technology Adoption Essential for HR

The Human Resources function in any organization performs a balancing act between the strategic needs of the organization and satisfying the expectations of the workforce. The key focus of the HR function is to define the people centric approaches that can be adopted by the organization to deliver strategic value to the business, so that it may remain competitive in the marketplace. Delivering services at scale and ensuring that the organization is ready for the future, requires the HR function to adopt technology.

Expected Outcomes From Technology Deployments

The expected outcomes from the adoption of HR technology solutions range from purely administrative aspects to support for the strategic aspects. Effective technology adoption should drive value for the organization and the workforce at the same time. It should provide the organization insights into the current state and facilitate decision making for the future. Consequently, deploying HR Technology solutions require careful thought and execution. Failure to do so, can create significant impacts for a business.

Talent Interplay for HR Technology Initiatives

The orchestration of a HR Technology initiative depends on a collective effort of talent from various sources, both internal and external to the organizations. Internally, the involved parties in a HR Technology deployment are typically the Executive Management, Heads of the business, Cross functional process owners, HR Professionals, and the IT Professionals. External sources include stakeholders from the product organizations that has been identified, the implementation partners or system integrators who help the organization deploy the application. At different stages of the deployment, there are other parties involved such as the change management professionals, testing professionals and members from the workforce. As can be seen from the discussion above, the deployment of any HR Technology application is a significant effort for any organization. A successful deployment therefore has dependencies on various members of the organization.

Key Players in HR Technology Deployments

While there are multiple layers of involvement and multiple teams involved in the process, the execution of the initiative depends on the active participation of the Executive management team of the organization, Heads of Businesses, Cross functional process owners, HR Professionals, IT professionals and the application experts.

Roles Played By the Key Players

Executive management Team: The Executive management team provides the strategy and sets the expectations from the initiative which must be operationalized. Their contribution is to create the strategy based on their view of the future of the business. They are involved in the key decisions, serve as change champions for the initiative and monitoring the initiative. As key influencers they need to demonstrate the behaviors that they expect the rest of the workforce to uphold.

Heads of Business Operations: While HR creates the approaches to managing the people needs, the Heads of Business operations are critical to the initiative. The engagement of the Business leaders drives the successful execution of HR initiatives. They bring the knowledge of what they need from HR

Cross Functional Process Owners: Organizations depend on the execution of various business processes that drives their services to their customers. The business processes are owned by specialized functions and yet are intricately dependent on each other. The HR processes are also intricately woven together with the rest of the processes and hence the inputs and participation of cross functional process owners is essential.

HR Function: As the interested party in the initiative, the HR function must be actively involved in the initiative. This requires the participation of HR SMEs at all levels to ensure that the application meets the desired expectations. They are the owners of the need, the designers of the approaches to meeting the need and ensuring that the need has been met.

Internal IT Function: IT professionals serve as partners to the HR function and help them navigate the technology landscape. Their knowledge comes from the support they provide at the application level, the touchpoints from a system perspective, understanding of data architectures, security etc.

Product Vendor: The role of the stakeholders from the product vendor is key to the engagement as they are the architects of the product. They understand the intricacies of the product and its limitations. Their contribution to the initiative is therefore critical.

Implementation Vendor Team: The consultants or experts from the implementation vendor is key as they bring product knowledge, process knowledge and experiences from deploying the application in various organizations. Therefore, they have a unique perspective of what works and what does not.

Why do HR Technology Deployments Fail

Successful technology deployments as stated earlier are intricately choreographed performances, that requires active coordination between the various teams and at various levels. As they say, there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. Having set the stage by identifying the parties involved in a HR Technology deployment, we will explore the characteristics of failures in the next article.