HRIS do You Need It?David Harland, Consultant, United Kingdom
The first question I would pose is WHY? Why do you need an HRIS?
I worked in a business with 4000 people across a number of subsidiary companies and we had no HR function and no HRIS. In addition, we only had one full time and one part time person running payroll and it was run in-house. I give this as it shows another path although non-conformant with current and indeed past trends. I was able to provide a significant amount of the data we needed from payroll with a small amount of augmentation.
In some businesses an HRIS may well be the best approach, if you already have an ERP suite in place using its HRIS module may be operationally the least painful approach. Whichever route the key is not the technology, but the thinking that goes into how you will use it and how you are going to use the information to help manage the people to get the best from them and for them and for the organization.
