Your HRIS is undoubtedly packed with more functions and options than you could ever master.
That is presumably a good thing, the tool can do what you need and more. So what do we make of an HR technology like FoKo which does nothing more than share photos or EmpInfo which does nothing but take care of calls from third-parties wanting to verify employment and income?
Does it make sense to buy software that just does one thing?
We get the answer from teenagers: Their smart phones are packed full of single purpose apps. Why does it work for them? Well, perhaps we need to ask why it wouldn’t work; in other words, why have we always wanted big multifunctional applications?
Having a great many single purpose apps wouldn’t work if they were expensive, hard to learn, or couldn’t easily share data. In the smart phone ecosystem, none of these issues are problems; that’s why single purpose apps thrive in the teenagers’ world and why they will thrive in the HR managers’ world too.
In the HR tech world of the future we’re bound to still have the big ERP, HRMS and TMS systems. We’ll also have a lot of single purpose apps that we won’t so much manage as make available.
We shouldn’t shrink from this future, embrace the HR app world and we’ll soon learn what works and what doesn’t.
(As an aside, I feel compelled to explain why a photo sharing app makes sense for business — it might be obvious for a teenager, it wasn’t obvious to me. Imagine you have teams around the world working on similar projects such as retail displays. A photo sharing app becomes an easy way for them to share what they are doing and it makes the team in Brazil feel closer to the team in Russia. It’s simple social engineering. But thank heavens you don’t need to figure out the relevant applications for your organization, your employees will do it for you — just get them the tool.)
