Against a backdrop of budget cuts, HR leaders still hanker after a better experience from the technology they and their teams use to get their day-to-day work done - and in 2021, they are prepared to invest to make that happen. 

That’s the message from Gartner’s 2021 HR Leaders Agenda survey of over 800 chief human resources officers (CHROs), which finds that:

nine out of ten plan to either maintain or increase their technology spending this year, regardless of departmental budget constraints.

When HR Technology Fails

For many of them, this willingness to invest could be caused by their current frustrations with existing solutions. In the same Gartner poll, for example, almost half (48%) of respondents state that the HR technology they use hinders, rather than improves, the employee experience.

At Avantra, we know from experience that, in many cases, this is not because core SAP products lack the features and functions that HR teams need - quite the contrary. Instead, it’s because the SAP landscape doesn’t perform well. In other words, it often runs slowly and sometimes grinds to a halt entirely. 

What does this look like in your HR department? Do you experience:  

• Delays to payroll processing? 
• Sluggish recruitment and onboarding processes?
• Disruption to performance reviews?
• Disjointed management of employee benefits?

When these problems occur, the result is typically yet another tense conversation between the HR department and the IT department to try to get the problem resolved. In the meantime, the HR department may be failing to hit important key performance indicators (KPIs) set for it by the wider organization. 

Worse still, as an HR leader, you can be pretty sure that if your own department is suffering, other departments in which the company’s employees work are suffering, too. And because there’s a direct link between IT system performance and overall employee satisfaction, the poor morale and diminished engagement that results quickly become the HR leader’s problem. 

Finally, there’s the customer to consider. When employees struggle to serve customers because invoice reconciliation, inventory look-up or field service scheduling are a headache for them, then customers suffer, too. The bottom line here is that how well processes that underpin the employee experience are running can ultimately become a key factor in how well the company performs. 

But let’s look at the problem more positively. Wouldn’t that be a great place to invest - in technology that optimizes the SAP landscape to deliver smooth-running applications and drive business success? 

This is where Avantra comes in. Our AIOps platform helps bridge the divide between line of business managers and IT operations teams, helping them to better understand each others’ worlds. By using smart technologies to underpin IT system monitoring and remediation, Avantra can drill deeply into the technology that underpins core business processes and ensure they are running optimally, so that both IT KPIs and business KPIs are consistently met. 

To get involved, HR leaders don’t need a computer science degree or an intimate understanding of IT operations - just a willingness to collaborate with IT and explore the options available. It’s time for line of business leaders to proactively recognize and support the requirement for highly functional IT systems, managed by their IT counterparts.

To find out more about how Avantra can help organizations connect the dots between line-of-business performance and IT operations, read our E-book "The Road to Business Success and AIOPs: Why Business Leaders Should Care".