Over the last few months, I have had the privilege of presenting at a number of large HR and HR technology conferences in Australia and the USA – It gave me the opportunity to mingle with a lot of  HR practitioners that I didn’t  know (or are not clients) and to hear first-hand how their day-to-day HR environments are operating.

What I can report is that there is a lot of good things happening out there in HR land ! – practitioners are very much aware that HR’s role is about achieving the business goals (alignment), and that every major HR intervention needs to have “line-of-sight’ to a business objective. This was music to my ears because these are signals that HR is shifting to new levels of HR maturity generally, and realising the importance of seeing HR as a solution provider to business goals rather than doing things for the sake of “HR best Practice”.

So while I see positive movement in terms of understanding the business role of HR, I was still disappointed  that there is not the same ‘growth’ in understanding the value that HR technology can can bring to the organisation. Don’t get me wrong, the HR technology space is abuzz with activity and everyone is chasing after the next best module, tool, social media plug-in or cloud offering. I’m pleased that we have this happening in the HR technology space because it is helping to create fascinating products and help achieve some fundamental shifts such as “HR technology that is simple and easy to use”, but I think there are many HR folk who are still in “transactional” mode rather than building their skill in how HR technology can support strategic HR initiatives.

So I’m on my education drive around levereaging HR technology and have put together a thought leadership paper on position management as a start. Hope you find it useful 🙂