The Road Ahead: Turning Human Resource Functions into Strategic Business Partners With Innovative Information Systems Management Decisions

This chapter explores the interplay of two mainstream research areas: human resource management and information system deployment, both of which have relevant implications for organizations. As human resources management plays a critical role for an organization’s success [1], challenges produced in the IS environment have significant impact for how human resources are managed. For many years, most of the human resources management initiatives have mainly focused on administrative aspects of HR (human resources) [2-3]. Although numerous studies have investigated the potential for human resource functions to be a strategic partner, human resources executives have not been perceived as strategic partners at all by their counterparts [4-5]. In this chapter, we argue that information technology offers the opportunity to free up HR from much of these administrative activities. Then, human resource functions could significantly focus on contributing to the organization’s strategy [3]. The key is the adoption of modern human resources information system (HRIS) built to, 1) delploy a self-service HR infrastructure dedicated to administrative tasks, and 2) gather strategic data and information in order to contribute to the business strategy’s formulation. The feasibility of such an interplay is acknowledged by the constant growth of the role that information technology (IT) is playing in business today, that has led to the development of new business models and new business processes [6].