Determining HRIS needs (Essay Sample)

Determining HRIS Needs
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Determining HRIS Needs

Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) have overtime become vital tools for many businesses. Even the smallest units of businesses need to realize and acknowledge the benefits of using HRIS in becoming more efficient.
Many medium size businesses have been running the same human resource system for so many years and it becomes important to replace these systems. In replacing HRIS, there are many considerations that should be taken into consideration such technological advancements and policy changes. Enterprise technology is changing very immensely and should be looked into with great concern. Enterprise technology shapes the progress of a business entity and determines how intensive and often an entity should redesign their HRIS. Businesses are also guided by government policies. Policies affecting on formation and running of businesses cannot be assumed under any case in the process of upgrading or replacing a HRIS. Proper scrutiny is necessary to ensure the replaced or upgraded HRIS is in line with with the prevailing and any possible changes in the technology. Technological changes can make an HRIS obsolete, it is therefore very in order to ensure HRIS is flexible and adaptable. Government policies affect how an entity is run and the range of activities it can carry out. When a need arises to replace or upgrade human resource information system, data must be collected to determine the feasibility of the said need. Data collection is necessary to document and determine the real need for an upgrade or replacement of the existing system. The collected data should be accurate and precise to help identify any loopholes. Interviews and focus groups are among the commonly used methods of data collection. These two methods come with some limitations. The two primary data collection methods produce large volumes of data. The large volumes of data have to be scrutinized to arrive at the most relevant data concerning the intended analysis. This becomes another limitation as it is rather challenging to collect only the relevant data in the initial phase of the process. How do you limit interviewees to respond precisely to what you want? Large volumes of data collected raise the cost and of the analysis and make it more time consuming. To avoid collecting too much overwhelming data, questions used in the approach should be precise and not too much outside the said limits. Experts who are able to derive relevant information should collect data.Another challenge of using interviews and focus groups is that there occurs a problem of how to design the survey. Questions for the approach must be simple but precise to achieve desired results. Achieving precision of questions is a bit challenging and problematic. Respondents do not always give timely responses. Respondents may give false information or respond in a manner that they deem fits certain situations thus undermining the prevailing reality. This challenge can be overcome by structuring questions that are simple to understand. There should be use of simple language that can be easily understood by the target group. The third limitation of interviews and focus groups is that it is requires direct communication between the data collection team and the target group. This is often a challenge. It becomes very difficult to come up with a common time to carry out the exercise. The organization may be structured in a way that it is difficult to use primary data collection means. To overcome this major challenge in data collection, effective secondary means of data collection...