A key advantage of cloud computing in an HR context is that it removes the need to talk about technology with professionals that have to date shown little interest in it.
Teresa Farrell, IT and projects manager for Irish Life and Permanent Plc’s group HR service centre development, said during a panel discussion at the Business Cloud Summit in London today entitled ‘The Cloud and My Job’, that HR practitioners had to date “never given enough attention to the capabilities of IT systems”.
“Cloud has taken the complexity out of saying to a business manager ‘do you need a new server or licence?’ It allows business analysts to work with HR managers to show how the technology can add value and especially new technology such as social networks,” she explained.
But while social media was very interesting in an HR domain because “it’s all about people”, it, like any concomitant move to cloud computing, did not and would not remove the need for HR to interact with the IT department.
Moreover, while some HR and recruitment managers were inclined to bury their heads in the sand in relation to social media and hope it would go away, “the next generation is going to demand it, especially in HR”.
Get in line
“There’s going to be demand for interactive and immediate responses and HR is going to have to go with that”, Farrell warned.
A potential downside for HR departments in moving to the cloud, meanwhile, was that, being simply one customer of many to an external rather than internal service provider, they would have to “get in line” and wait for additions or changes to existing functionality, which some would find difficult to cope with.
The IT infrastructure of Irish Life, which sells products such as pensions and life insurance, is mainly based on mainframes and Oracle databases, but the firm also uses SuccessFactors to run its HR function.
But Joanna Owen, head of commercial management at Travelport, which provides business-to-business services for travel agencies in 160 countries, also pointed out that, even if a decision was made to move IT infrastructure and applications over to the cloud, traditional skills in areas such as change, release and upgrade management were still required.
“The pitfalls can come in where clashes occur between the business and IT over best practice in processes and the like so you have to watch out for that,” she said. In cloud terms, the company uses Salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies’ knowledgebase.
