“No one vendor provides best-in-class process support across all HR functions, and project teams may need to evaluate offerings from multiple HR software submarkets.”
Selecting, implementing and managing HR technology is a complex and time-consuming endeavor. Evaluation frequency has continued unabated over the past five years as enterprises continue to fully transition to the cloud, at times replacing their initial cloud investments with “next generation” alternatives.
The Gartner® Embedding an ‘Eyes Wide Open’ Mindset Into HR Technology Selection report observes that despite the high stakes, many organisations find their due diligence activities and selection don’t always achieve the desired outcome of a “best fit” solution.
Embedding an ‘Eyes Wide Open’ Mindset Into HR Technology Selection
See the Gartner® report on how teams responsible for deciding on their organisation’s next HR technology investment can set themselves up for success.
“HR technology leaders struggle to choose the right HR solutions due to competing internal priorities and a complex vendor landscape. They should ensure proper team resource mix and use critical use cases to drive detailed requirements for RFIK/RFP and vendor demonstrations to overcome these challenges and select best-fit technologies.”
Key Findings
- Organisations often lack a comprehensive HR technology strategy which results in insufficient time gathering requirements and properly evaluating provider alternatives.
- No HR technology is perfectly suited to all industries, geographies and employee size segments, making trade-offs between conflicting internal priorities inevitable.
- The HR technology marketplace is complex, with multiple providers competing across market segments yet vendor demonstrations rarely provide the level of detail end users require to determine which product will best meet their needs.
Strategic Planning Assumption
By 2026, 75% of global midsize and large enterprises will have invested in a cloud-deployed human capital management (HCM) suite for administrative HR and talent management (TM) but will still need to use other solutions for 20% to 30% of their HR requirements.
Ensure Proper Team Resource Mix Across
Project Phases
Most HR technology evaluation teams are charged with driving the selection process within a relatively short time period. Often, team composition is weighted toward available corporate functional and technical staff over which project executives have direct control. The tendency is to keep the team “small and lean” to expedite results.
This approach may be faster (as well as initially cheaper), but any speed advantage can be offset with issues. For example:
- Not gathering fully developed requirements in support of critical use cases to drive sufficiently detailed vendor RFI/RFP responses or reveal enough differentiation in solution demos
- Underestimating the time needed to gain consensus from stakeholders on which competing internal priorities are highest ranked
Gartner clients should reject the temptation to cut corners in the evaluation phase. Instead, staff a somewhat larger team that includes representation across involved geographies and primary user roles, such as:
HR Process
Owner
HR System
Administrator
HR Business
Partner, Generalist
HR Data
Specialist
Manager
Employee
Recommendations for HR Technology Leaders Conducting Selection Project
- Require that the evaluation team includes a mix of functional, technical and line of business (LOB) staff, as well as “typical” employees and managers.
- Ensure understanding of desired outcomes by using critical use cases and business capabilities modeling to drive detailed requirements for RFI/RFP and vendor demonstration scripts.
- Take charge of the demo and include time for “test driving” by primary end-user roles and roster follow-up sessions (technical, implementation and support) with vendors.
- Review and scrutinise to what degree the solution’s customer community has influenced product direction and affected the vendor’s subsequent delivery of product enhancements.
Your Next Steps
See the Gartner® Embedding an ‘Eyes Wide Open’ Mindset Into HR Technology Selection report to “ensure proper team resource mix and use critical use cases to drive detailed requirements to overcome these challenges and select best-fit technologies.”
Source: Gartner, Embedding an ‘Eyes Wide Open’ Mindset Into HR Technology Selection, Ron Hanscome, Harsh Kundulli, 30 January 2024.
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