XIM, Bhubaneswar Francis Castelino
Automating an HR department through HRIS
From the simple early days of personnel administration, human resources management has emerged as a more powerful and active participant in organisational development and decision making. Until the 1970's, most organisations referred to the department that handled employee hiring, firing and tracking as personnel. These record-keeping/reporting procedures concentrated on personnel transitions through which the company got to know who had been hired, fired, promoted or transferred. Staff could determine how many full-time, part-time, permanent and temporary employees worked in a particular section, department, division, region or company. They could report on the present and to some degree, on the past. However, these procedures did not aid significantly in developing strategic or tactical plans.
In the 1970's several factors added to the department's data collection and analysis responsibilities. Demographic and economic changes combined to increase frequency of job changes in the population. As management increasingly recognised the importance of hiring internal staff for critical positions, specialities such as succession planning and work force forecasting emerged. Many human resources departments began spending more time on planning and analysis to support top management requirements for decision-support information. To include such management-level functions, many personnel departments took on the name human resources. Besides all routine, largely operational personnel functions, a human resources department also included staff and compensation planning, management and career development, productivity measurement and turnover analysis. Management, recognising the importance of improving integration of the human resources department with the strategic business direction of the entire organisation,...