The Changing Role of HR now and in the Future

Human Resource functions and responsibilities are changing and intensifying at a faster pace and to a greater degree than many other areas of the corporate organisation.

Once relegated to the back office and concerned mainly or exclusively with transactional processes and functions, HR organisations are taking a greater role in strategic business activities.

Efficiency remains the foundation of HR. More transactions must be completed at a lower cost, while processes are becoming increasingly complex to manage.

A typical 10,000 employee company handles more than a million employee related transactions annually, each of which costs in the region of 50 Euros.

The top 10 recruiters in Europ report that they are placing 35k to 95k employees annually. Managing the recruitment pipeline, the selection process, and the induction process is a complicated endeavour.

At the same time, however, leading HR organisations are looking far beyond the execution of HR transactions, to a more value-added and strategic focus.

These organisations are aligning human resources and workforce planning functions with the overall business strategy, to help increase profit margins and support long term goals.

The study analyses several dimensions; staffing, cost, organisational model, IT deployment, and best practice adoption. The following key conclusions demonstrate how companies are meeting today's human capital challenges;

1) As a first step, HR managers strive to optimise the efficiency of transactional processes by standardising, automating and integrating business processes, based on Best Practice process and technology models.

2) Optimising transactional processes frees up resources that allow HR organisations to invest in more strategic functions that facilitate business growth and increase employee productivity.

3) Centralising and consolidating HR operations in a shared services environment helps increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the HR processes.

4) Outsourcing, while used frequently for transactional processes, does not always drive top performance, either in cost or service quality. Organisations need to carefully evaluate the value, performance and cost benefit trade off in outsourced versus in-house service delivery.

5) Information Technology continues to provide the basic foundation for efficiency and acts as the key driver for efficectiveness and future innovation.

Leading organisations recognise that IT supports the development of many best practices and they continue to invest in IT to integrate systems, data and processes across the enterprise.

Briefly, the study finds that the best human capital management organisations are constantly re-assessing their processes, to strike the correct balance in the drive to optimise efficiency, cost and service delivery in a continually changing global environment.

Top performers in this area balance the traditional demands that drive company profits and growth and help prepare for future innovations.

NYPD Spend $1M on New Typewriters! Change what change?

They say you can't stop or turn back Time but the NYPD have found another option for not progressing, avoid change and live in the Past!

Why is IT Change so Difficult for Political and Government bodies alike? It is bad enough that Typewriters are still in use by the NYPD but now the city of New York has signed a new three-year, $1 million deal for MORE typewriters, the majority of which will be used by the NYPD.

While the department has endured a major, multiyear technology overhaul, with some big success, it demonstrates that IT change is often well intended, meticulously planned but not always carried out or implemented in its entirety.

New York Post
Technological change is never easy, or quick, or perfect, especially for big bureaucracies. Unfortunately, the NYPD made news this week when the New York Post reported that the City of New York had signed up a $1 million contract with a typewriter vendor to purchase thousands of new manual and electric typewriters, during the next three years.

Improvements made
The NYPD's typewriter requirements, accounted for the bulk of the contract. The article describes how NYPD Deputy Commissioner and CIO Jim Onalfo, who took over the reins in May 2003, had invigourated the NYPD's IT department and brought them into the 21st century.

The article also reported that changes to the insular and bureaucratic culture and legacy loaded IT environment, had been vast. Massive improvements were made in areas of disaster recovery, wireless communications, networking infrastructure, and many others.

Three Years In
Even three years into Onalfo's serious IT overhaul in 2006, glaring disconnects were still present: "Each of the 76 precincts is now connected by a videoconferencing system that ties into a command center at One Police Plaza," the article stated. "Within some of the precincts, however, there are still detectives using typewriters to fill out paper reports and filing carbon copies."

Essential Typewriters
NYPD cops "still use typewriters to fill out property and evidence vouchers, which are printed on carbon-paper forms. There are typewriters in every police precinct, including one in every detective squad." This is not felt to be part of a strategic disaster recovery solution but the NYPD stated; "We are working on software to eliminate the old machines," a police representative stated.

Huge Strides with RTCC
It should be noted that NYPD IT and CIO Onalfo have made huge strides in overhauling how the NYPD uses new technologies. The NYPD relies heavily on the Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC), a high-tech "war room" where detectives are able to tap into dozens of police, government and other related databases. As an example of the RTCC's power, real-time information from police officers at the scenes of crime can be meshed with the sophisticated database queries made at the RTCC to help to track down criminals.

Crime Stoppers Hotline
In addition, emergency 911 capabilities allow citizens to directly transmit photos and videos to the police at the RTCC. New Yorkers can also send text messages and multi-language e-mails to its Crime Stoppers hotline program.

Typewriters Everywhere
In truth, there are probably a lot of businesses and government agencies that have stashes of typewriters in their offices, just like the NYPD does. But until everything is digitized, there will be a seemingly mind-boggling need for typewriters.

The NYPD's typewriters are both a lasting vestige of the way things were and how they uses to be done in the past but it is a shocking reminder of just how much more change and education needs to be done.