HR Excelleration – 5 Essential Digital Business Capabilities

April 27, 2021
Season 1, Episode 21

Host Clayton Gammill, Associate Principal, HR Transformation for The Hackett Group talks with Dave Polacheck, Director, HR Advisory about how digital transformation has the ability to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and customer experience for the HR function.

Show Notes

Tune in to the Business Excelleration podcast, a podcast by the Hackett Group, bringing their laest research, benchmarks, and best practices on world class performance. Listen to top experts as they share about obstacles, detours, and milestones from their own journeys. In today’s episode, host Clayton Gammill welcomes on guest Dave Polacheck, director for Hackett’s HR advisory. They chat about the emphasis on both speed and value, as HR teams work to quickly adapt with technology to the growing and ever-changing business needs.

After a brief introduction to phrases that will be used in the podcast—CRM, B to B, B to C, RPA, HRMS, DENI, knowledge networks, and data lake—Clayton jumps right into asking Dave about the digital transformation’s impact on the HR function. Dave discusses the importance of optimizing function and serving the various stakeholders of HR. As the digital transformation hits HR from all angles, differentiation between companies is seen in whether a company becomes an expert in the technologies they’ve chosen, if they integrate new technology, in their ability to change management, their effective communication, and finally their overall accessibility.

How do we accelerate this digital transformation? What do you have to prioritize to move faster? Dave talks about the importance of understanding your HR team and what capabilities your workforce has as a baseline; only from here, can you set reasonable next steps. Learn to prioritize your digital landscape roadmap around strategic outcomes through business strategy and talent. Dave emphasizes a real structured framework here. Clayton touches on the 5 essential digital business capabilities and asks Dave to elaborate for just a moment on each of these.

5 capabilities:

  1. Digital engagement
  2. Digital workforce organization
  3. Digital service optimization
  4. Digital ecosystem
  5. Analytics driven business insight

In terms of engagement, Dave touches on looking into experience; quality of data; and understanding your stakeholders and how they will interact with you, what their talents are, and what they will need from you. Map the process from their experience, rather than just thinking about the flow of data. Find out what the importance of segmenting is and how to do this.

Next, Dave shares about how organization can enhance the digital workforce. How does HR become more digital? Become more structured to enable your teams to be more consistent and effective. Listen in on how to attach knowledge management to the problems you are solving.

Third, digital service optimization and RPA tools are looked at. While these tools are dependent on scale, Dave says it is key to stick to what your company has gone with in other areas. Be selective in your RPA so you do not overplay. Cloud based technologies have opened opportunity for shares services, but it is important to learn how to manage these.

In discussing the digital ecosystem Clayton and Dave move their attention towards integrating external sources. They chat about talent acquisition, external sources informing internal processes, and collaboration tools.

Finally, they take a look at analytics driven business insight. Predictive analytics used to be a high priority; now, we also have predictive talent analytics. Dave shares that there is not always a need for statistical analysis to answer the questions you want answered. He encourages the listeners to spend as much time on visualization as they do on data analytics. Governance of good quality data is key!

So what? What steps are necessary in this journey? Set up your baseline with a heat map of both risks and opportunities, along with blueprints of where you want to be based on risks, the strategic workforce plan, and the capabilities you have. Prioritization is crucial.

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