PIHRA Scope - Fall 2008 - (Page 24) How to Break Up But Stay Friends How the Software as a Service Revolution Will Set HR Free By Diana Van Blaricom, PHR Achievance, Inc. With IT PIHRA Conference Speaker 2008 this. You’re in a bad relationship. It’s gone on way too long for all the wrong reasons but, out of habit, you stay put. You dismiss the bad things and look for the positives. Sound familiar? It should. Welcome to the world of HR and IT in the average American workplace. But it doesn’t have to be that way. And it won’t be for long. The traditional role of IT as the gatekeeper of all things tech is disappearing fast. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going away anytime soon, but the shifting nature of IT in most businesses, and the reasons behind it, do present a tremendous opportunity for HR to be much less dependent on IT and to take charge of their own technology needs. Picture CHARTING THE CHANGING ROLE OF IT To realize the scale of opportunity and what it means, it’s important to understand the changing technology landscape and to determine why IT is undergoing such dramatic change. That’s simple—technology and the comfort level of employees using technology have evolved. Workers, recalibrated by the familiarity of consumer and entertainment software and Web 2.0, are bringing a new savvy to workplace software and relying less and less 24 PIHRAScope Fall 2008 on IT as the sole decision maker when selecting software. Plus the operational immediacy of software as a service over the Internet is spelling the end of both the onsite gargantuan server rooms of yesterday as well as expensive onpremise software implementations as we’ve known them. All this means less technology gatekeeper work for IT and a lot more insecurity about IT’s role in the organization. HR managers should be sensitive to this evolving dynamic, but also realize that the climate exists now to dodge the road blocks that unfortunately many IT departments have placed between human resources and obtaining new HR technology solutions. Thanks to a new generation of intuitive software products, life can be made a lot easier for HR, as well as for managers and their people. FEATURE UNDERSTANDING NEW TECHNOLOGY, SEIZING LEADERSHIP The first step to operational freedom and toward leading an organization rather than an IT project is to understand the seismic shift in technology. By fully grasping the benefits of new innovations and ideas, it’s simpler to find ways to sell those benefits to internal management while still allaying the fear of IT departments that any change can’t be good. Most critically, the world of selfservice in the technology arena is here today. The exponential boom in gaming and entertainment software over the past 10 years and Web 2.0 websites have hardwired an entire new generation of employees, and many existing ones too, to want control over what they see on their computer screens and the way they interact with it. Those same principles of immediacy and experiential expectation arrive in workplace software in the guise of software as a service, software provided over the internet, instantly accessible and at a fraction of the cost of expensive on-premise software implementations. It sounds simple enough, but its arrival will revolutionize the effectiveness of companies and democratize technology within the organization as users take advantage of applications tailored
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