How digital is HR? Many CHROs and CIOs would argue “a lot”, referring to the many HR IT projects they have recently completed or have underway.

And it is true that the scope and adoption of digital technologies around HR processes has vastly increased in the last 5 years, fueling the growth of the Human Capital Management applications software market.

HR still largely invests its technology budget in digitization, i.e. replicating the very same analog/manual processes in new systems. Digitization benefits are functional and process-specific: their value cannot exceed the range of thousands or (best case) millions of NOK. More often, these benefits are detached from or invisible to the business that HR function is supporting.

What HR needs is an immediate shift towards digitalization. Competition with successful digital businesses already valuated at billions of $ requires action today, and not tomorrow: talent acquisition and retention, new/hybrid organizational structures including partnerships and increasing amount of free-lancers, as well as agile ways of working, diversity and inclusion, and insight-driven workforce decisions are just a few topics requiring a profound change in the way HR thinks about, plans, selects, implements and operates.

But what is the difference?

• Digitization: The widespread definition is “the conversion of analog to digital”. The transition from LPs to CDs, if you recall. In HR, examples are digital job boards replacing newspaper job postings, performance management systems replacing paper forms or self-service case management systems replacing employee calls to the HR department. New (or improved) technology but very same old process.
• Digitalization: The Gartner definition is “the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities”. It is the transition to become a digital business – from CDs to Spotify. This transition cannot succeed unless the organizational practices and processes and culture revolve around the new business model.

We can support you in both. And yes, it is important that you first digitize your HR data so that this can be used as a basis for your digitalisation agenda.

With our long track record in implementing and rolling out HR system solutions (SAP, Lumesse ETWeb, Talentlink, Workday, etc.) and combined with our deep insights in best practice business processes within HR, we can help you optimizing your processes and moving them over onto a digital platform.

If you already have come a long way on the digitization, we can help you optimizing your HR IT landscape, making sure that you have common platforms for all your entities, the same data structure within your system and compliant with GDPR and data security regulations.

We can also go much deeper, defining your journey to the next level in HR and help you getting there. Building on your existing solutions, looking at your customer's journey, we can help you implement solutions that are employee centric and built around apps, Robotics, Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence.