Human Resources in a Digital Age - Dissertation Example

Globalization and global competition have been imposing great pressure on managers in organizations to make better and faster business decisions. Investments in information and technology have also been creeping up along with this pressure. Investments in the area of information and technology are considered to be one of the critical means of improving and fastening up management decision-making. Even then, organizations have faced great difficulty in realizing the potential of investments in the areas of information and technology in businesses. This has been particularly visible in the business area of human resource management, even though longer lead times associated with changes in human resource management systems necessarily mean HR accounts for a major candidate to derive benefits from information and technology. To emerge successful amidst the increasingly and global competition managers are constantly faced with the pressure of controlling labor costs, motivating employees and subordinates to provide high-quality services, enhancing customer-oriented performances, and constantly searching for better and new ways of doing the jobs successfully. Circumstances make it mandatory for organizations to meet these objectives against all odds in the face of a shrinking workforce and the global environment in which employees hail from diverse and multicultural backgrounds located across different parts of the globe. Even the routine and conventional tasks maintaining records of employees and regulatory and legal compliance have become increasingly geometrically intensified. In other words, systems and operations in organizations have become more complicated and this consequently demands more sophisticated technology applications which go much further beyond the conventional tasks of improving the routine task activities. Managers have their own stake in exploiting information technology for furthering and bettering human resource management. However, various managers have different views regarding the effectiveness of the use of IT in human resource management. Some consider it extremely crucial and critical for the competitive advantage of firms (Aswathappa & Dash, p.95).
Previously the concept of HRM used to be referred to as personnel management and administration. The notions have dramatically transformed and given birth to the concept of strategic HRM. This is because, in addition to the conventional functions of HRM it plays the additional strategic role of adding value to the different HR functions which are of strategic importance for the organization. With the wide diversity of the subject coupled with the advent of information and technology in all spheres of life, it is imperative that HR activities would be largely dependent on IT. Moreover, it is also expected that the effectiveness of HR roles and functions would be considerably dependant on the success of the application of information and technology in the system. However, it is seen some organizations do not regard IT as being one critical success factor success for HR in organizations.
Since the present research deals with the transformation of HR activities that have been brought about in organizations with the advent of information and technology, it primarily presents the degree of influence that IT has played in this domain.