The Impacts of HRIS Implementation and Deployment

on HR Professionals’ Competences: An Outline for a

Research Program

Michel Delorme

Kuwait-Maastricht Business School, Dasma, Kuwait

Abstract. In many organizations, computer information systems affect every

aspect of business operations. The widespread use of HRIS and web-based

applications in business globally raises the question of the new competencies

required for HR professionals. Human resources systems are now viewed as

sustaining the competitive advantage of the firm. In this paper, first we

elaborate on the evolution of the roles and responsibilities of HR professionals

and the new competencies that are required from the strategic perspective, in

other words their contribution to the strategy of the firm. Then, from the IT

perspective, we review how the introduction of new technologies in the

organization affect the way HR professionals accomplish their tasks not only

within the HR department but also with the rest of the organization. After that,

we recommend some HRIS research questions and the methodological

orientation that should prevail in the context of complexity that characterizes

the introduction of HRIS in organizations and the new roles assigned to the HR

professionals.

1 Introduction

In many organizations, computer information systems affect every aspect of business

operations and serve a significant role in creating a network among stakeholders [1].

The widespread utilization of web technology has conducted to the deployment of

web-based HRISs [2]. The number of organizations adopting e-HRM is continually

increasing according to a research project conducted in Europe. “Online HRM” seems

to be a more accurate term in order to include activities such as e-HRM, enterprise

resource planning (ERP), HR service centers, interactive systems, HR portals for

employees and managers, and web applications. Performance-oriented cultures are

more likely to implement change, and consequently adopt electronic tools [3].

The collaboration between HRM and IT has been identified as a crucial factor in e-

HRM adoption and use [4]. Other variables that have to be taken into account in the

decision of adopting e-HRM are the sector of activity of the firm, the top management

view [5], the level of skills of the employees, the structural complexity, or the

stakeholders’ considerations [6].

Prahalad and Hamel [7] argued that the core competencies of an organization

defined as the collective knowledge and capabilities in the organization will give this

Delorme M. (2008).

The Impacts of HRIS Implementation and Deployment on HR Professionals’ Competences: An Outline for a Research Program.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Human Resource Information Systems, pages 76-82

DOI: 10.5220/0001743200760082

 SciTePress

organization a competitive advantage from the strategic perspective. The core

competencies approach of strategic management is directly linked to the resource-

based view of the organization [8].

The widespread use of HRIS and web-based applications in business globally

raises the question of the new competencies required for HR professionals. A stream

of research in the field of IT has emerged that generally posits that the roles and

responsibilities of HR professionals have changed over the last two decades with the

introduction of new technologies in the organization [9, 10, 11]. Human resources

systems are now viewed as sustaining the competitive advantage of the firm [12].

The structure of the paper is as follows: first we elaborate on the evolution of the

roles and responsibilities of HR professionals and the new competencies that are

required from the strategic perspective, in other words their contribution to the

strategy of the firm. Then, from the IT perspective, we review how the introduction of

new technologies in the organization affect the way HR professionals accomplish

their tasks not only within the HR department but also with the rest of the

organization. After that, we recommend some HRIS research questions and the

methodological orientation that should prevail in the context of complexity that

characterizes the introduction of HRIS in organizations and the new roles assigned to

the HR professionals.

2 HRIS’ Implementation and Deployment and Roles and

Responsibilities of HR Professionals

Researchers have established the link between human resources management

practices and the competitive advantage of the firm [13, 14]. The management of

human resources is an important challenge in value creation for companies in general

[15]. Indeed, systems of performance indicators used by companies include learning

and development perspectives that rely heavily on human resources as the basis for

strategic accomplishment [16].

The resource-based view highlights that human resources systems can lead to gain

and sustain a competitive advantage [12,14]. In this competency-based perspective, it

is essential to understand how the introduction of a new technology affects the way

HR professionals work in this new context and, thus, how their core competencies are

affected. Magalhaes & Ruel [2] observed a shift in many organizations from the “file

drawers to computers’” style of managing the HR Department. This stage has been

reached with the arrival of new HR professionals and IT specialists working together

in the development of electronic information systems initially created for the purposes

of the HR Department.

Considering the new roles and responsibilities of the HR Department and the

expectations of top-executives concerning the HR function, we can predict new

challenges for the HR Department not only in the traditional roles but also for its

contribution to the global strategy of the firm including its contribution to the IT

strategy. In other terms, HR professionals are not only users of HRIS but they must

also act as strategy’s architects of the HRIS for the whole organization. In addition,

HR professionals must play complementary roles such as change agents in the

implementation and deployment of new technologies, employees’ representatives

regarding the implementation of HRIS issues, and advisors for first line, middle and

top managers of the organization regarding the impacts of HRIS on HR policies,

programs, and activities of the firm.

One of the recent tendencies in many organizations is to outsource some

components of the HR function which are strongly related to the use of IT (e.g.

compensation and remuneration, administration of the fringe benefits, recruitment and

selection). Paradoxally, it seems that one of the main reasons of outsourcing concerns

the lack of knowledge, skills and abilities of HR professionals in computer literacy.

At the same time, organizations expect that the HR professionals exert a control on

the same outsourced activities. However, outsourcing some HR activities seems to be

the norm for many organizations looking for more organizational flexibility.

Technological developments have changed the way to do business from both internal

and external HR perspectives.

Because they are now seen as business partners for the organization or strategy’s

architects, HR professionals must participate in the design of HRIS not only for the

internal use of the HR Department but also for the use of other stakeholders. This new

role involves the development of specific competencies in the area of IT and HRIS for

HR professionals.

3 HRIS’ Implementation and Deployment and Competencies of

HR Professionals

Auer & Ruohonen [17] suggest that the skills, knowledge and attitude of

organizational actors affect how information systems are managed and put to work.

For HR professionals, the challenge of dealing with new IT systems is recent, since

many organizations have turned to information systems technology in order to adapt

to a more complex environment [9]. In order to overcome the challenge of the

integration of the information systems with the rest of the other functions of the

organization, Magalhaes and Ruel [2] highlight the importance of the organizational

change competencies. For Cummings and Worley [18], managing this type of

competency is one crucial aspect of the new roles of the HR professionals.

The literature on competencies in the management field is characterized by a

variety of approaches [19]. Two main streams of competencies’ approaches emerge:

the strategic approach [7, 20, 21, 22] and the individual approach [23, 24]. The

strategic approach of competencies reflects a macro perspective of competencies and

argues that an organization’s main advantage derives from its core competencies and

its valuable, rare and inimitable resources that it can manage [25]. The individual

approach of competencies mainly observed in the HR discipline and in the sciences of

education sees the concept of job competencies at the micro level, the individual. Job

competence in this perspective is seen as a fit between the person’s characteristics and

the requirements of the job [22, 23].

In this paper, we suggest that the strategic perspective on competencies must

prevail according to many authors’ point of view [26, 27, 28] who pointed that the HR

systems must align with the organization’s strategy. Thus, the roles and

responsibilities of HR professionals within the organization are diversified and have

evolved from an administrative or operational perspective to a strategic perspective.

Contemporary researchers in the HRM field highlight the strategic role of HR

professionals and see them as business partners, [13, 29, 20], strategy architects [30,

31] or business allies [31].

Lindgren et al. [32] highlighted the need for aligning the structural features of

organizational competencies between the organization’s strategic orientation and its

HR infrastructure. Saying so, it is necessary to turn attention to individual-level

competencies and the ways to develop them. Because of the interdependence between

organizational needs for competence and individuals’ competence interests [32],

organizations who adopt a skill-based approach on competencies instead of a task-

based approach will have to promote their competencies needs to their employees

including the HR professionals.

A research conducted by Society for Human Resource Management [33] has

identified five critical competencies for all HR professionals. One of these

competencies is entitled “HR technology – Ability to leverage technology for HR

practices to deliver value”. Only 28 % of the respondents mentioned that they were

very proficient in that competency compared to scores varying from 47 % to 73 % for

the other critical competencies. This result suggests that computer literacy is probably

one of the weaknesses of HR professionals.

Considering the results of the survey conducted by Society for Human Resource

Management [33] illustrating the weaknesses of HR professionals regarding the

computer-based skills, it seems that the education system in business schools is not

fulfilling totally the gap between the needs identified by HR professionals for

accomplishing their job successfully and the training they receive in business school.

Slocum and Hellriegel [34] insist in their model of seven core competencies on the

importance of the communication competency, the latter including the use of a variety

of computer-based resources for all managers including managers and professionals in

the HR field. There is a need to analyze also the responsibility of organizations

regarding the training and development of their HR people. “As HR in general is not a

primary process” [2:12], investments in the HR function are more difficult to sell to

the top-executive team.

4 Further Research

Further research in the HRIS and the competencies should be aligned in the

perspective of the chaos theory due to the complexity and unpredictability of the

environment in which these systems are implemented. Chaos theory applies to

qualitative studies of unstable, non-linear, and dynamic systems [35]. According to

Magalhaes & Ruel [2], HRIS has been characterized by a high level of complexity,

with HRIS dealing with all aspects of organization. For this reason, HRIS cannot be

studied separately from its organizational context.

On the other hand, we agree with Magalhaes & Ruel [2] regarding their

methodological perspective for conducting researches in the HRIS field. According to

these authors and also in order to follow the path given by Giddens [36], it would be

an asset for further researches to combine the strengths of both qualitative and

quantitative research methods. In the case of a qualitative approach, researchers can

learn directly and more in-depth from the people involved in the research (employees,

managers, HR professionals and other stakeholders). When using a quantitative

approach of collecting and analyzing data, the aim of the researchers is generalization.

A combination of both methodological approaches for further researches in the HRIS

field would blend the strengths of the positivist research and the interpretative

research.

In this perspective, we recommend that more research in the HRIS field should be

conducted in order to identify the new competencies required for HR professionals

regarding more specifically their new contribution in the field of HRIS. The main

research question should address the problem of the new roles and responsibilities of

HR professionals and the new requirements of the job in terms of knowledge, skills,

abilities, and other characteristics to be successful. Another aspect that should be

investigated by further research in the HRIS field concerns the best practices between

companies across different industrial clusters for policies, programs, and initiatives to

help improve the training and development of HR professionals regarding their

computer-based competencies. We recommend also for a future research the analysis

of the different initiatives already undertaken by higher education institutions and

organizations to respond to the specific training needs regarding the competencies

required for HR professionals in the field of HRIS. The latter type of research should

analyze more in-depth the integrative approach of the business’ schools rather than

the specialization approach, according to Mintzberg’s point of view [37].

Since we can observe a trend in the corporate field to establish external alliances,

partnerships, mergers, and acquisitions, the next-generation firms need to shift their

focus beyond just top-down and bottom-up organizational relations to horizontal

structures that will encourage collaboration across the partners [38]. The next-

generation company will build a highly collaborative approach of doing business and

will be characterized by a higher degree of organizational flexibility, a networking

way of communicating, and will also rely on his technology to encourage personal

interactions and cross-fertilization within the organization. Further research should

also focus on the use of different structures (e.g. technology teams, ad hoc teams) in

successful companies in order to build a stronger network based on HRIS.

In this era of e-business, many HR internal drivers will contribute to the enterprise

growth and its changing requirements [39]. Professionals of HR Departments will

have to play a more intensive role in order to lead people to adhere to the vision,

values, and core competencies of the firm. They will have to deploy HR systems

regarding topics like: 1) managing performance, 2) learning and development, 3)

knowledge technology and information infrastructure, 4) recruiting, selecting and

hiring, 5) compensating and rewarding, 6) organization structuring, and 7) business

focusing and planning [39]. New Technology is the hearth of the new business design

in an age of uncertainty. It seems that a stream of further research in the e-business

field and more specifically in the HR field should focus on the effectiveness of HR

systems deployed in order to assist people in the organizations to adhere to its vision,

values, and core competencies and the roles, responsibilities, and competencies of HR

professionals in this integrative approach.

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