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Investment in HR software requires a thorough business case that pinpoints all costs, potential benefits and project risks to receive financial approval and endorsement across the organisation.
HR IT expert Ananda Roy offers a guide to building a more realistic business case that will ultimately help you to get the most productive use from technology to support strategic HR.First, do you need to invest in HR software?
HR leaders and chief information officers ask this question constantly when justifying a business case. The case for investing in HR software in your company depends on certain key parameters:
- Does your organisation consume more than 20 per cent of your total operating costs on your people?
- Does hiring and retaining talent feature regularly in your strategic meetings?
- Are you looking for ways to better align individual performance to business goals?
- Are you creating a new performance culture within your organisation?
- Are you looking at cutting the cost of delivering HR services and processes?
- Do you wish to forecast and plan people programmes to deliver measurable outcomes?
If the answer is yes to most of these questions, an investment in HR software is probably well-justified and an important part of your HR strategy. This is because HR software will help to enable your plans efficiently and consistently and will function as the foundation of a number of initiatives that can have measurable results.
Specify goals
As a first step, define your company's goal for investing in HR software.
Your aim could be to reduce the administrative cost of HR functions, such as simplifying the manual labour required to manage a benefits programme. The goal may be to increase employee productivity, by reducing the time it takes a manager to open a job requisition and enable a new hire or the time it takes for an employee to change their benefits selections or calculate their current incentive pay performance.
Next, be sure that all stakeholders are committed to the project.
To achieve the benefits that HR management software can provide IT departments must implement the appropriate infrastructure. The human resources team must communicate the goals of the programs and re-engineer thei
