Key to organisational excellence today is a powerful workforce that learns and acts faster than its competitors. This requires a radical mindset change for HR professionals. It requires a shift from the traditional bottom-up approach, to a strategic, top-down approach.
"The HR field has increasingly been challenged to become a strategic player within the organisation," says Andre Zitzke, chief technology officer at SAS Institute. SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence.
"While this is an exciting change for HR, it has been a difficult one. In the past, the solutions to aid in doing this either did not exist, or were too difficult to use," Zitzke adds.
To rise to the challenge, organisations have begun to place increased focus on the HR sub-organisation. This sub-organisation typically consists of the organisation's human capital management systems as well as the people and processes that deliver these functions and services.
"The focus of a committed and capable workforce, combined with the ability to develop essential competencies and train employees in a way that helps them learn faster than their competitors, is the key to organisations excelling in the marketplace," says Zitzke.
"This requires moving from concentrating on the traditional functional areas of compensation, compliance and other traditional HR processes, (a bottom-up approach) to a top-down approach that focuses on the implementation of corporate strategic plans.
"The ability to define core competencies and skills, the technology to be used, as well as the corporate culture, is required to understand where HR is in relation to what is required to support an organisation's strategy. Once these objectives are identified, the organisation can align and map the road ahead for human resources and technology to the overall organisational strategy."
In anticipation of the fast-growing demand for HR professionals to strategically manage their intangible assets within organisations, SAS has developed an innovative approach to the management of human capital.
SAS's analytical solution, SAS Human Capital Management, exploits data from traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, third-party data sources and other enterprise-wide data sources. It allows for fast retrieval of information and the robust analysis capability is accessed in a user-friendly point-and-click Web environment. Having access to the information captured within an organisation on a day-to-day basis saves time, money and resources.
"One of the key elements in designing an effective HR strategy is to create and implement an HR measurement system," says Zitzke. "Designing an effective measurement system - and more importantly, being held accountable for it - can be threatening unless the measurement system can link people, strategy and performance."
SAS Human Capital Management integrates enterprise-wide data sources and organises them in a way that allows for the easy retrieval of information for measurement.
These measurements in turn can be compared with Saratoga benchmarks data, and ultimately applied to the strategic applications of the organisation.
Specialised cuts of benchmark data will be included in pre-built applications for benchmarking organisational workforce issues surrounding recruitment, staffing and retention. This data will allow the user to view comparisons surrounding terminations, salary structures and trends, compensation modelling as well as compare turnover, headcount, churn and other metrics geographically. Most importantly, the functionality of comparing Saratoga benchmarks to ad-hoc generated queries, reports, statistical analyses and tables are included within SAS Human Capital Management.
Balanced scorecards are playing a major role in aligning HR with organisational strategy. Metrics that supply the balanced scorecards must be easily accessible from the enterprise-wide data sources, and must be accurate. SAS Human Capital Management not only provides the foundation for these balanced scorecard metrics but also automates the process.
"Once targets and measures are analysed through the balanced scorecard approach, discrepancies or flagged metrics can be explored in detail. The time saved by HR in accessing integrated data, organisational defined metrics and the automation into the balanced scorecard is tremendous," says Zitzke.
"The day or weeks that HR used to wait for reports, months or years they waited to integrate data sources, and the additional time it took to feed information into a balanced scorecard, now takes minutes.
"HR now has the ability to link people, strategy and performance through the use of technology," concludes Zitzke.
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