Technology Enabled HR in Indian IT Organizations

Many Indian IT Services Organizations are now truly global (in terms of size, revenue, geographic spread, employee profile).Their meteoric rise has been fashioned by pioneering the low cost offshore centric model and successfully executing large, complex and sometime mission critical IT Projects .So this might be opportune moment to quickly understand if their internal IT Systems, especially HR Systems are robust and scalable to help them achieve their global aspirations.

Given the manpower intensive nature of the industry (employee cost as percentage of revenue is typically pegged at 50-55% ),the key challenge that faces the Indian IT Industry is acquiring, developing, deployment and importantly retaining of Human Resources (at least key talent).Are Indian organizations investing adequately in progressive IT enabled people management systems ?

The analysis is purely confined to Indian IT Product/Services organizations. (Back -office IT arms of global conglomerates have to invariably align their HR Technology strategy consistent with the Corporate roadmaps)

Good news first.Atleast the big Indian IT majors have achieved basic employee record keeping discipline .Most of them have typically done it using the robust ERP systems (SAP, Peoplesoft etc).With this at least basic employee census is now a passé for them. Though many might loathe admitting it, this itself represents quantum leap .Not long back HRIS teams used to struggle reporting precise employee count due to bewildering complexity engendered by phenomenal growth across locations and exacerbated by poorly designed home grown record keeping systems (sometimes even done manually).

My feedback however suggests that ERP implementations have not been taken to their logical culmination. While budgets and lack of focus on building good Internal HR system might be primary reasons, there are few other factors too.

Paradoxically while many of them have burgeoning (and sometimes matured) ERP implementation services for their clients, the expertise is hardly made available for in-house deployment of ERP (Not only in HR domain but also sales, fianace etc) .The internal HR IT implementation and support teams tends to be typically staffed with greenhorn programmers .It provides fertile training ground before they can be quickly pitch forked to chargeable client assignment. At the helm of affairs are Project Managers who are ‘past their prime’. Some organisations view ERP buy decision as investment to build their practice to serve clients. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in this but it does lead to situation where there is mismatch between intention and outcomes

Good news again. Most organization definitely have fairly well evolved Intranet ‘portal’ with good measure of employee self-service capabilities thrown in .The success of self-service could be attributable to the easy adoption ,given the high IT literacy of the employee population. This is despite several instances of user interfaces not being very friendly and elegant

As far as Performance Management, Compensation Planning and Learning/Development, the processes themselves seem to be perpetually in the state of flux .So whenever automation is attempted, it ends up automating chaos. My enquiries reveal most of them use some kind of in-house system .I guess none of the Indian IT biggies have implemented any of best of bred,point solution that dot the talent management landscape.The homegrown system more often than not are incapable of mapping the ‘new’ and ‘improved ‘ performance management process that HR inevitably comes up with every year

Recruitment is one area that technology has tremendous potential given the insatiable manpower needs of the Indian IT industry. Except for honorable exception of Wipro Technologies, the idea of leveraging technology in recruitment process does not seem to have percolated across. Using Commercial Job boards (Naukri) and few static career pages in the corporate website is where staffing organization’s idea of technology ends .Most recruiters that I have interacted have infact disdainly dismissed the utility of Talent Acqusition or even Applicant Tracking system as they feel its completely divorced from the reality of IT recruiting in India

As far as adoption in areas like HR Analytics go, it looks a distant dream now. Good starting point might be at formal, documented cohesive HR Technology plan that should of course stems from the HR strategy of the organization

Capping it all is the lack of appreciation among the HR Leadership in India (I have interacted with very few) on technology being the key cornerstone of HR Service Delivery strategy.

While it cannot be disputed that Indian IT industry has been witnessing excellent growth (thanks to the sterling efforts of Sales and Delivery Organisations) ,HR leadership should start thinking in terms of establishing systems,(with help of technology of course) that help them furthering their global aspiration