Market Guide: Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS)

This guide to HR Information Systems (HRIS) is the second in a series of Market Guides looking at technologies and services that sit adjacent to ITAM in large enterprises. The purpose of this series is to provide an introduction for ITAM professionals to the tools used by their key stakeholders. By doing so, we will identify areas of overlap in tooling and further opportunities for collaboration. ITAM starts with Trustworthy Data, so it makes sense to look at the market for tools which may provide data and services of use to ITAM teams.

What are Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS)?

Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) are database applications used to track the employment lifecycle of an employee. The scope of solutions available varies – some have broad lifecycle coverage whereas others may be more focused on operational day-to-day management of employee data.

Why are HRIS of interest to ITAM?

Increasingly, we’re managing licenses and subscriptions allocated to users rather than devices. As such, we overlap with HRIS in that we’re both managing the aspects of the employee’s tenure with our organisation. There is great opportunity to integrate closely with HR teams to remove inefficiency and improve employee experience, particularly in terms of cost & risk management and automation.

HRIS users use their tools in the same way that we do, with visibility, self-service, lifecycle management, and automation being key capabilities. This isn’t surprising, given the tendency in HR in the last 20 years to refer to employees as resources, human capital, assets, etc. Once you do that you abstract from the individual person and classify them as assets based on certain criteria (length of service, pay grade, reporting line, and so on). This mirrors what ITAM teams do – we see employees as users, as consumers of assets, and so on.

It’s easy to see therefore that HRIS track assets and ITAM tools track assets. And those assets are often using the same metric these days – User. When data points align in this way it becomes possible to integrate information systems for mutual benefit. Let’s look at some of those integration points in more detail.

Recruitment

Knowing company plans for recruitment is a key benefit for ITAM teams tasked with planning for future license demand. As we know, vendors such as Salesforce offer preferential pricing based on seat growth. If ITAM teams are engaged with HR they can plan more effectively and potentially secure better pricing. In the shorter term, knowing what’s in the recruitment pipeline for the next week, month, quarter, and so on enables operational efficiency by matching license availability to demand.

Onboarding

First impressions count. Ideally, a new employee should be fully provisioned with the IT solutions they need to do their job on day one. That’s an increasingly complex challenge ITAM teams can help to solve. For example, if we know Jane is joining engineering in two weeks as a senior engineer we can check if a copy of AutoCAD is available for deployment to her. Likewise, we can also check hardware stock for a suitably high-power workstation for her.

In larger organisations, particularly in high employee turnover industries such as technology and hospitality, scaling up onboarding to cope is a challenge. This challenge is exacerbated by the increasing reliance on subscription software – deploying even 15 new SaaS subscriptions to a new employee is no mean feat and is therefore a process ripe for automation. ITAM might not control this process but it’s a key stakeholder, as we hold the data on license and hardware availability that enables onboarding. Functionality built into our SaaS Management tools such as role profiling can help here, as can integration with the IAM tools discussed in last month’s Market Guide. Provisioning new employees with hardware and software is a subset of a much bigger set of deliverables enabled by the onboarding functionality in HRIS.

Employee Engagement

Our tools go a long way to defining our company culture. Having the right tools to do your job is very important in securing employee engagement and overcoming any detrimental effects on what HR professionals increasingly refer to as Employee Experience. For ITAM teams this means ensuring that our processes are efficient and can scale to meet employee self-service demands for hardware and software. That requires integration with ticketing systems, IAM systems, and HRIS. Away from the operational aspects of self-service, ITAM teams can also help HR track employee satisfaction with tools – for example by reporting usage trends. Early action can be taken by internal communication and training teams if ITAM teams detect that a newly deployed application isn’t being used (adopted) as expected.

Offboarding

Offboarding is the closest alignment between the IT asset and employee lifecycles. The ITAM team should have detailed data regarding the hardware and software used by the employee. An efficient offboarding process is essential in meeting cost, risk, and security goals for both HR & IT. With the HRIS being the system of record for the employee lifecycle ITAM teams need their tools to integrate with those systems. The offboarding operational task may be performed by other stakeholders (e.g. Service Desk) but the system of record for IT hardware and software assets assigned to the employee is the ITAM system. Matching ITAM asset records with employee records ensures all allocated hardware is returned, software licenses are harvested, and data privacy and security requirements are met.

HRIS Market Overview

HRIS as a concept has been around for as long as there have been personnel or HR departments. Whilst business computing started with financial planning and stock control undoubtedly its first use outside of number-crunching was in personnel. The clerical deliverables of tracking employee working hours and payroll prevailed in the ‘60s and ‘70s but by the 1980s a new breed of HR systems came to the fore with the release SAP R/2 and other ERP systems. By the late ‘80s dedicated standalone HRIS arrived with the release of Peoplesoft, and this was quickly followed by others. The 21^st century has seen cloud-based HRIS such as Workday come to the fore and modernise and differentiate HRIS capabilities. As of 2020, the market is mature with a range of solutions to meet the needs of different-size enterprises.

There is disruption and innovation occurring because the way we work is also changing. Modern systems need to be able to cope with flexible hours, a global workforce subject to differing territorial employment legislation, and the reality that work can now be performed anywhere & at any time. The disconnect between HR & employees has also come to the fore with many tools focusing on capabilities designed to address employee wellbeing, engagement, and diversity.

Tools featured in this guide can meet these modern use cases and requirements. We have also selected tools which offer integration features via APIs, and strong automation capabilities.

Inclusion Criteria

In compiling this guide, we sought to include a wide variety of solutions in terms of cost, target organisation size, and geographies. If you are a vendor with a HRIS solution that integrates with ITAM tools and processes and are not included, please contact us for possible inclusion in a later revision. Similarly, if you are an end user of a solution not listed, please submit a review on The ITAM Review Market Place.

Representative Vendors