SilkRoad Survey: HR Departments Behind in Integrating Available Technology

 Cloud-based HR solutions provider SilkRoad, in releasing its survey “Strategic HR: Integrating Data and Applications for Business Advantage,” has found that most HR departments have only partially integrated their available technology for HR processes. Of the survey respondents, which included 380 HR professionals, 73 percent reported having “some level of HR integration,” while two-thirds said that “their organizations’ HR functions were still only partially automated with spreadsheets used for some activities, such as storing employee profiles.” The most frequently integrated functions were recruiting and onboarding.

According to the survey, 18 percent of respondents said that they had integrated recruitment and onboarding and 13 percent said they had integrated the full range of functions including onboarding, performance, learning, succession, and workforce planning. Just 27 percent said that they could access HR data through mobile devices though 57 percent said they plan to use social media in their HR strategies. Regarding big data, only 19 percent of respondents said they would include it in their HR strategy within the next year.

The report chastised this lack of integration in saying, “…only when talent management applications share data will professionals have the information they need to support workforce planning and better business decision-making.”

But it also recognized that HR integration is complicated due to the common practice of using multiple vendors, “…and getting those systems to talk can be very difficult. Each vendor typically has a different process and stores data differently, so bringing those systems together can be tough.”

SilkRoad recommends integrated suites that encompass all HR processes or asking providers to design interfaces that make communications between various systems simpler so that data sharing is more straightforward.