HR Tech: A longitudinal view of the industry
From the Bundy Clock time-tracking machine which had workers inserting a thick card into a slot to get their in-time stamped to the modern retina scan, HR has soared the technology curve and is now galloping ahead
C OVER
STORY
By Satyakki Bhattacharjee
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What we were
O
ver the last three decades, the business ecosystem has seen many sweeps of changes. Waves of emerging trends hit the business world, yet the fundamentals of doing business have rarely been contested. A brick-andmortar company in the industrial town for ages or an unseen e-commerce startup; hail-a-cab became call-a-cab; or the modern company with a swanky office in an upmarket business district – Cost, Quality, Service, and Speed are the obvious common pursuit of them all. Kaoro Ishikawa’s 4M’s of business extended to six. Man, method, machine, material, milieu, and measurement got into an interplay to create a process | august 2021
matrix of people, operations, accounting, strategy, finance, and marketing. Interesting but by no means elementary. Every business process domain eventually took to technology to make life easier. HR too! From the Bundy Clock time-tracking machine which had workers inserting a thick card into a slot to get their in-time stamped to the modern retina scan, HR has soared the technology curve and is now galloping ahead. Cut to the 2020s and India is seeing the largest popula-
tion of Gen X in the world. A whopping 34.23 percent who come to work with diverse career aspirations, and workplace preferences. The managerial life of them and their managers is transforming too. The pandemic and the business complexities associated with it are only making the recipe of success even more complicated. Therefore, enters the next-level technology. PeopleStrong says that Indian companies can save at least $600m annually by 2021 using HR Technology (PeopleStrong, 2017).
With more and more organizations shifting to an organizational design that is a matrix, synergies of processes are in demand. Thus, technology is leveraged for optimal collaborations across functions
