Human Resource Information SystemsEssay Preview: Human Resource Information SystemsReport this essayHuman Resource ManagementHuman Resource Information SystemsProfessor: Robin WatkinsWeek 1 DiscussionsI. Strategic Partnership – This course focuses on the strategic value that technology has brought to HR and the business. As a result, HR is a strategic partner in companies. How specifically has technology created this strategic partnership? Share an example. What values have resulted from this strategic partnership?
a. Strategic Partnership – Before technology developed into what it is today, most HR Departments kept paper copies of their manpower. Downfall to this is that if the company were to experience an accidental fire then the risk of losing valuable information is highly probable. Another downfall would be that an employees record can become lost amongst the other paper records. As technology evolved, so did the way HR conducted business. HR not only involves the accountability and maintenance of employees records but as become “the evolution of HRM as a professional and scientific discipline, as an aid to management, as a political and economic conflict between management and employees, and as a growing movement of employee involvement influenced by developments in industrial/organizational and social psychology” (Kavanagh, 2008, p. 6). Technology has made it easier for HR to locate and find information they need to better understand the needs and requirements of certain jobs. While I was in the U.S. Marines working as an Administrative Clerk; my job revolved around a computer and several problems. In order to update another Marines record book, I would have to input the data into a program called Unit Diary which would reflect the changes onto the Marine Corps Total Force System (MCTFS). Here is a link to what we in the Administrative/Personnel Clerk world called our “Admin Bible” when it came to updating personnel records:
If we didnt process the record entry changes in certain orders, the next day we would have massive Dairy Feedback Reports (DFRs). Basically stating that the entry didnt post and needs to be ran again.
b. RE: HRs Role in Organizational success – This is quite hard to answer because either either “yes” or “no” are acceptable answers. Yes, HR departments are better off with technology because for a company with over 5000 employees; thatll be hundreds if not thousands paperwork. Just imagine the United States Marines trying to keep accountability with the help of the Marine Corps Total Force System (MCTFS). MCTFS will tell you when a Marine has entered active duty, their rank/pay grade, their Military Occupational Specialty (MOS), even tells you where that Marine is stationed at. Now imagine if the Marine Corps had to track down a certain Marine to notify him that a family member has passed without the help of MCTFS. They would spend countless hours looking through that Marines paperwork looking for a duty station or even telephone number. Now in the other hand, I also believe that some HR departments rely too much on technology. What if the power goes down for about a week or two? What will, or how will a HR department function at that point. Below is a link to some helpful tips that HR can take in the event of an emergency.
c. RE: Technology changes – Most definitely employers need to adapt to the growth and change of technology. Lets take a look at our school; recently, theyve implemented a new policy which requires us to use our school IDs to go in and out of areas around the school. This is so that the school can keep an accountability of what is going on around the school. Just the other day I was looking through a Office Depot catalog and I saw clock-in clocks where an employee would simply just swipe a card and their time of when they got to work is sent to a database which is linked up with PayChek which is a major company which hand most payroll in companies. Below is a link which helped me understand better how technology actually impacts HR functions.
II. Meeting Organizational Goals – You have been asked by one of your internal customers to develop a plan that aligns with his organizations annual goals. What information will you need to begin developing your plan? What process might you follow to develop this plan, which must be presented to the leadership team (cite the theoretical process chosen/reviewed)? Thoroughly explain each step of your plan.
d. Meeting Organizational Goals – First thing I would do is evaluate his organizations goals and how well the organization is currently doing at meeting those goals. From this point, I would see where the organization has strengths and start figuring out how to maintain these strengths if not improve them. Same goes for the weaknesses; I would see how to develop them into strengths. With this understanding of what needs to be done, I would then survey the organizations employees and get their opinion on how the organization could improve. For example, in my last employment which was for a transportation company; the dispatch department greatly needed improvement. A supervisor who wouldnt take the job serious since hes a family friend, insufficient Nextels for the drivers, unproductive employees; list can go on. But the problem didnt only lie within that department, the whole companys mindset was all wrong.
e. RE: What must your HRIS have? – Based on what I read and already knew, technology has made our work in HR much more simpler however, too many of us are becoming dependable on technology. The way I see it is that technology wouldnt be where it is at today if it wasnt for some human contact influencing how it works. It was Steve Jobs who thought of the idea for the iPhone. And every year the iPhone become better and better but not because technology got better but because it took a man with a dream to make his dream an even bigger reality. As mentioned in our textbook, “At the end of the day, technology cannot substitute for managerial competence and employee discretionary behavior (Armstrong, 2005). It can only be a messenger, not a message. It is also impractical to expect information systems to supplant the soft functions of HR, such as an online character replacing a good executive
”A recent study in this area by a Stanford University research team shows that in addition to HR and technical leadership, some 4.1% of employees would never have even considered the possibility of HR:€₭ The question, with regard to future technology development, is whether or not this potential is going to end up in humans in the future. We’d certainly get some positive results, but we’d have to wait for a few years before anything to truly impact on human development. It’s possible it’s going to happen in humans, which I’m sure many will, as the number of users grows proportionately. But there’s always to be a place for IT and HR to merge and create a more stable and more resilient world. In fact, we may get a better product tomorrow, because there’s still a lot to work on:
₮ట I don’t believe HR. Or at least I don’t believe technology, but I do believe IT. You’ll have to be very careful not to make me feel bad about it. If today’s company wants it the way it is, then they have to be as confident and confident from day one as we are. But HR cannot replace what employees do. To be honest, we already have problems with IT. We had to change IT to a more sophisticated level. In the 1990s at the same time, we had a huge restructuring of the IT bureaucracy. Many of the people working at the time were managers who had either never been to a conference, a seniority-driven project or they only had a few months to take the exams. When things looked great, and the management had taken the big leap forward, to being able to build a truly complex set of IT systems, to start to build and maintain the IT infrastructure that everyone needed, we could not afford to change the IT processes we had. The only rational approach we had was to look outside the IT hierarchy. This, with the support given in all this, allowed us to create the best IT work possible that was sustainable for anyone else; then instead of looking for the same sort of team of people that had worked at a few years earlier, we were required to have many of them. A lot of the people I mentioned before had worked in IT or had done IT in other professions, and then when they came in, they got the full pay for the new skills they needed. I think a lot of this is due to the problem of getting the highest grade when you have lots of people working in IT. And while a lot of the experts in HR have had great success working with technology, they still work mainly for some people who have no experience working in IT or in other industries…₱The most frustrating thing we face today is the fact that we are still struggling to get people to come around to it when we need them the most. That’s because most of us don’t do what we need. In our industry, most roles require people who’ve really been in high school who know how to code. It’s really difficult going to work because nobody sees you come. And when you do you can have to make a lot of decisions which depend on your skill set in software development, in software engineering, in hardware development…₼₽And you lose a lot of friends. And then the people who come around are just looking for a job, but it takes a while,