HR automation in the smartphone era

MUMBAI, INDIA: For organizations across verticals, the importance of managing and utilizing their human resource (HR) has become one of the key factors for achieving business goals. Over the years, the HR functioning has been getting transformed and automated through the use of IT.

James Thomas, country manager - Kronos India, talks to Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News about technology shift in HR processes, growing importance of mobile workforce and challenges in developing mobile-based HR applications, along with growth of mobility in Indian market. Excerpts:

With organizations opting for automation and IT systems today, how much technology shift are you seeing in the HR processes?

Today’s worker is very different from the worker of 10 years back. With evolution of Internet and mobility, the engagement of today’s worker and HR processes has been very different from what was in the past.

Earlier the HR automation was pretty much administrative in nature with gathering data or information about employees through an automated system for performance management and recruitment process. It was more of administrative and operational in nature; however, this is changing as the processes are moving to real-time as today’s workers are mobile and tech-savvy, using devices such laptops, mobile phones, smartphones like iPhone or Blackberry, gives new dimension to the HR automation processes.

This has allowed today’s workers to communicate or notify their top managers using mobile devices on a real-time basis from anywhere at anytime. So the contextual relevance of applications is shifting dramatically and that’s where platforms like mobility is allowing intuitive decision making.

The entire business application space is shifting to guided-intuitive decision making where you are able to see things and act at anytime from anywhere, both from an employee as well as management context. And that’s the shift and organizations are really waking up to it. In terms of application areas, it is extremely important to have applications that touch people and have social relevance in a way how new-age worker thinks and behaves.

For Kronos, how challenging it is to develop enterprise class applications in today’s time where the scope of mobility and social media is growing?

Developing business applications in the era of mobility and social media is an innovation challenge, which basically calls for significant R&D investment and through process with evolving technology and environmental changes and accordingly developing applications that behaves in such ecosystem.

So if you look at what we have recently announced, for example the entire mobile application suite, it is aimed at possibly positioning us at the top level, as we are the only company in the mobile workforce management space. However, developing such applications calls for significant changes in the entire product architecture and making it available on to small devices.

Five years back, a technology used to stay for 18 months, before the next one came in. Now the shelf life of most things, not only technology, is getting shorter. As the shelf life shrinks, even from a technology perspective, you need to have the ability to adopt and transform to those changes. Even for technology companies like ours, it’s no longer 36 or 24 months product cycle to make it to the market, and investment in research and innovating cutting-edge technology and products has gone up.

How much you bank on the mobile application in today’s time as businesses are more focusing on mobility to drive their business?

For me, at this point of time, mobility is possibly an interesting additional thing to the way core applications are developed and made available today. In terms of Kronos mobile application, we have moved into the market to keep ourselves ahead of time and tried to give our customers the options which they never thought of.

I think, the mobile application will gain importance over a period of time and will become a mainstream in times to come. But as a company with the mobile application, we have given an option to customers in using our application.