Why is it important?

The HR function in both public and private sector organizations faces a number of competing challenges, which create ambiguities and tensions in what it delivers, how it delivers, how effectively it delivers, and to whom it delivers (Martin, Reddington & Alexander 2008).
Competing Claims on HR and Their Relationships
The tensions underlying these challenges capture two distinctive and often divergent sets of pressures on organizations. The first set is the external versus internal pulls that exercise the minds of managers, often embedded in the distinction between operational and strategic management. The second set relates to the goals of strategic or operational activity inside an organization - whether these are principally aimed at maximizing shareholder value or more concerned with legitimacy of operations. These dimensions produce a matrix that helps us understand how modern HR management teams in a number of organizations have developed a set of interrelated, transactional and transformational strategies to meet the external challenges set by the business strategies of modern organizations and the longer-term branding and reputational drivers.
To deliver HR strategy, organizations typically respond with a mix of re-organization of the HR function itself and new information technology (IT) approaches. The introduction of technology, therefore, offers the potential to transform HR’s role. It promises to do this by:

• Increasing the HR function’s influence as consultants focused on the needs of managers and employees
• Enabling new flexible and responsive methods of delivering HR services, such as self-service via the Internet or Intranet
• Expanding HR’s reach as the experts of the organisation’s people processes and the developers of value propositions for different employee groups.

As such, it can be seen to represent a major paradigm shift in HR management, as it moves from a more traditional administrative support role into ‘business partnership’. So the claims for new organizational solutions to HR and for the increased application of technology to HR processes exert strong pressure on organizations, including many in the public sector, to replace their integrated HR functions with the tripartite ‘Ulrich’ framework.
Thus, the ‘bandwagon’ of technology-enabled HR solutions, often called ‘e-HR’, seems to be growing at a rapid rate driven by some evidence of promising practices and positive evaluations of technology and outsourcing projects. Indeed, over time, the term e-HR has attracted a variety of meanings.
Basic Open-systems Model of e-HR
However, this bandwagon in support of e-HR adoption is also fuelled by some ‘dangerous half-truths’ or ‘total nonsense’ (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006), and influenced by the persuasive powers of the growing number of consulting firms selling e-HR as part of a package of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions (Lengnick-Hall & Lengnick-Hall, 2006). And progress in the form of the transactional and transformational benefits of technology investments seems to have been more piecemeal and problematic.
Key Question
The evidence presented has explained the arguments for introducing new technology and processes which create potential ‘added value’ for managers and employees through more effective information flows. Further, it is claimed that this added value is created through aligning the function more closely with business/corporate strategy and the longer-term reputational aims of organizations. However, the evidence also points to counter-claims that investment in new technology and processes has failed to deliver the promised results, which leads to a key question:
How do we deploy and adopt new technology and processes in a way that creates value?