Assignment 6(HRM) 21st Century Corporation

What do you think will the 21st -century corporations look like?

In the 1980s many organizations gained competitive advantage through downsizing and financial restructuring. The 1990s confront us with the need to get back to basics. Large organizations are searching for a competitive advantage by being faster than their competitors in satisfying customer needs. These competitive organizations are capable of ongoing adaptation to environmental demands. In this article the authors speculate on the way these self-renewing organizations are organized, the managerial processes that enable them to capitalize on speed, and the characteristics of the leaders who manage them.

As we envision what the corporation of the 21st century should look like in order to thrive in a global and dynamic economy, it’s critical for universities and policy makers to have a comprehensive understanding about the new realities inside corporations. Creating or running a company with significant employee ownership is not simple, but has been demonstrated to be a successful model with benefits to all—employees, shareholders, and customers. Business schools play a critical role in helping individuals as well as organizations understand the components of employee
ownership, defining the possibilities of implementing ownership-based practices, and most importantly training today’s business leaders and our next generation leaders to strengthen the commitment both of employees and employers to the health and success of the 21st century Corporation. New and faster technology, redefined values, and shifting customer demands are changing the way businesses operate in the twenty-first century. Human resources and business leaders are faced with the challenge of redefining their strategies on leadership, talent, and diversity, while evaluating their operational effectiveness.

The Human Resources organization in most companies is changing dramatically, which usually translates into smaller, more centralized, with more technology-enabled services and systems. Few companies are exactly where they want to be, but in many firms, HR looks quite different in size and delivery model than it did just a few years ago. And it appears certain that it will look even more different in just a couple of years. There was much discussion in the 1990s about the demise of HR, and about the need to become more strategic. Although I agree with the push to align the HR business with company goals and strategy, what many companies have also done is cleanup the operational side of the HR business. They have improved the efficiency and effectiveness of myriad services and products, and have strengthened their credibility as a viable contributor to the bottom line. The continuing development and use of Web and self-service information technology is bringing the Human Resources function into the 21st century. The structure and role of the HR organization has been slowly moving, in most Fortune 500 companies, toward a more management-oriented and business strategy-driven function. The HR organization in many Fortune 500 companies has used proven information technology for many years, with IVR (interactive voice response), and ACD (automated call distribution) being good examples. But in most cases, the technology was used in isolated parts of the HR function such as benefits administration and program/policy descriptions, and thus had limited impact on the overall organization. More recently, HR has begun to employ ERPs (enterprise resource programs, such as PeopleSoft and SAP), browserbased portals with text, data, and simplified point-and-click use, and outsourced service applications, which now enables the HR organization to transform how it works and supports the entire enterprise. The year 2000 became the unintended impetus that helped many HR organizations move away from outmoded legacy mainframe systems and initiated the gradual use of more advanced information technologies. The continued pressure on cost reduction and process improvement has forced many HR organizations to take big steps into manager and employee self-service, and to move rapidly into Web-based HR portals. (It has been estimated that an employee transaction through the Web costs about one-tenth of an IVR telephone call, and one-one hundredth of a manual transaction through a personnel administrator.) These portals are bringing together both internal systems and external “outsourced” systems for easy use by the manager and the employee. In addition, the portal permits the inexpensive provision of other employee services such as discount travel, child care, financial services, legal advice, wellness resources, etc., making it a more attractive 24/7 stop for the average employee and their families. Full integration of various HR applications has not yet occurred, but the potential is becoming a reality. But more importantly, the portal permits world-wide use of Web-based applications such as strategy deployment efforts, knowledge management, project management, global mass communications, and distance learning for virtually the entire workforce. These systems now have a more direct tie to work teams and projects, as people collaborate from common networks and systems. The use of this information technology has enabled the HR organization to concentrate resources and to form centralized areas of HR expertise. Most organizations are still in some part of a transition from the traditional local HR “generalist” model to a “virtual” organization with 24/7 access. I expect there will always be some level of human intervention and personal touch service to the workforce through the HR organization. But information technology continues to play a larger role in HR service delivery, and has become both an enabler and a driver for a more effective and efficient HR organization. The question as to how fast this happens in a particular enterprise appears to be largely driven by a company’s vision, mission and values.

http://www.orcworldwide.com/readroom/Schaeffer-0310-11.pdf