Virtual HR - The Irresistible Force? Part I
Posted August 20th, 2009 by SSON
Among the many difficulties facing the HR community today, perhaps none is proving as intractable nor as profound in its ramifications than the question of how to respond to the rapid automation of the discipline. The rise of “virtual HR” challenges the very nature of human resources; with more and more companies opting for increasingly hi-tech solutions devolving growing portions of the core HR burden to the end-users themselves, what is the nature of the role to be played by the remaining human participants within the process? What are the new organizational structures emerging from the interplay with the technology and how do these behave when put under the stress of, say, a financial crisis, or a ‘flu pandemic?
What exactly defines “virtual HR” is a matter of debate among HR practitioners and others - an issue further colored by the fact that many businesses and proprietary systems include “virtual HR” in their names or brands. Generally, if simplistically, it refers to the integration of information-enabled systems and automated processes into the practice of HR and the daily engagement of HR’s various functions. How this occurs and what this entails vary so widely from organization to organization - ranging from automated vacation-request processing to running training sessions through Second Life - that defining the term precisely seems like a discipline in itself.