Adoption and Success of e-HRM in a Cloud Computing Environment: A Field Study

2.1. The Digital Transformation of HR

The digital transformation of companies is progressing, and the digitization of HR processes is a part of it (Bondarouk & Ruël, 2009; Stone & Deadrick, 2015) impacting the way HR are developed (Stone and Dulebohn 2013). The Sierra-Cedar 2017-2018 HR Systems Survey (Harris & Spencer, 2018) shows that the planned adoption rates for workforce management or talent management have risen to more than 80%. It also demonstrates a clear tendency for workforce and talent management systems to be transformed into a cloud-based Software as a Service solution (from now on HR Cloud), where over 50% of the HR technology environment is already implemented. Harris and Spencer (2018) state that the mapping of HR core and talent management processes in HR Cloud solutions has increased by 4% to 63% and by 5% to 79% respectively since 2017 until now. On the other hand, on-premise implementations of HR core processes have fallen by 11% to 33% and talent management by 5% to 19% during the same period. This report also concludes that an average user experience score of 3.51 points, which is 0.61 points higher than comparable on-premise solutions, also speaks in favor of an HR Cloud environment, and companies that have a comparatively high cloud adoption rate tend to see their requirements met there. These HR Cloud conversion projects take a long time and tie up many external and internal resources (Harris & Spencer, 2018). Consequently, this raises the question of how to measure success after implementation and which influencing factors exist during the digital transformation of HR processes in cloud-based solutions.