Retaining Talent -- The CIO's New Challenge
By Pankaj Maru
Mumbai, Jun 25, 2008

Ideally, one of the CIO's roles is to draw a strategy that drives the businesses, aligning the latest technologies, which utilises the available resources optimally and enhance higher efficiency and productivity. However, along the cutting edge technologies and other tools, the HR staffs play a crucial in the growth of the enterprise. Hence, the management of HR has also become an added responsibility on the shoulders of today's CIOs.

Chandru Theagarajan, CIO of Sudaram Business Services agrees to the fact that CIOs are responsible for maintaining the workforce while strengthening and planning out a strategy to meet any eventualities.

"Cross training in functional areas, develop required expertise to back up emergency situation - needs careful planning and developing skill sets by job rotation, training and mentoring junior staff. Businesses get affected by long leave or sudden separation and, so careful analysis and backup plans needs to develop for continuity in service," explains Theagrajan.

In drafting an HR strategy, the CIOs have not just relied on training, mentoring and analysis but have gone a step ahead towards technological answers to resolve the issue. More and more CIOs are advocating and implementing automated HR solutions today.

"Automated solutions greatly reduce the mundane tasks, smooth the functioning and, provide comfort levels to operational managers. When automation of process is achieved, the efficiency and effectiveness of the functional tasks are attained in a consistent manner," says Theagrajan.

However, Theagrajan argues the key challenge lies in the mapping of best practices and adopting the same in an automated manner.

Interestingly, Sanjay Mehta, CEO of MAIA Intelligence brings a new perspective on the use of technology by CIOs. Mehta says that the CIOs are now applying BI analytics to monitor and manage their workforces in a better way.

"Workforce and attrition analytics provide insight into employee trends and profiles. One popular usage is for analyzing workforce diversity that deals with evaluation of employee diversity considering the ethnicity, equal employment opportunity law categorization, and other criteria. Another is for analyzing employee turnover by seniority, longevity, and manager, or by age-group, gender and ethnicity," adds Mehta.

Talking of innovative HR solutions, Pune-based Zensar Technologies has deployed the Employee Self Service system for its 4500 employees. According to the company's HR head, Prameela Kalive, during the past 2 years the system has greatly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of the HR processes, which helped the staff get their requests serviced faster and better.

"The system has helped us provide much better responsiveness and also commit turn around times for servicing the staff requests. As we have grown globally over the last two years and have 25% of our staff working out of our 22 global locations, we have been able to sustain this high level of responsiveness because of the systems," adds Kalive.

Further, Kalive points that now the employees make their requests for leave, loans, infrastructure needs, personal data updates, performance appraisals, and tracking of the request status - all is done from their desktops without moving to other departments and people. "All such request and services are managed online with system," she states.

According to Ganesh Natarajan, CEO of Zensar Technologies, the self service application has helped to improve the productivity by 20 %. Automated HR system is the only way to go as companies expand globally and need to connect with their employees' world over, he adds.

"We will see more and more of these systems being deployed in organizations and finding place in the CIO's charter of critical systems for enhancing organizational effectiveness and productivity," Natarajan states.

However, Natarajan demands a balance between the need for systems and automation, along with the need for retaining the face time with employees which is and will continue be the cornerstone of an effective HR function.

Again coming back to the CIO's role and the responsibility of mapping the HR strategy in enterprises, the use of automated HR applications or Human Resource Management Solutions (HRMS) has gained universal acceptance.

In fact, these HR applications are considered as an effective tool for CIOs today. "Automated HR solutions are imperative in a fast changing workforce, in order to eliminate process dependency on specific resource or its skill sets. A clear documentation will help train a new resource in acquiring new skills of any given process.Hence, CIOs should opt for HR solutions," concludes Theagrajan.


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Automating the Transactions of the HR Department