eHR Cloud Transformation: Implementation Approach and Success Factors

1. Introduction And Objectives

The research on electronic human resources management (e-HRM) covers two distinct and widely separated fields of academia and practical management: information technologies (IT) and human resources management (HRM). This article will aim at analysing both of them from a holistic and a practice point of view, contributing to the research gap. Therefore, it will analyse fields such as IT and HRM, and how much more effort is needed to bring and integrate them together. There are three focal fields in HR digitalisation: digital employees, work content and digital employee management (Strohmeier and Parry 2014). “Digital employees” refers to the upcoming generations with a high affinity to IT entering the labour market (Prensky 2001). The “work content” defines how to work in a digital working environment while the “digital employee management” refers to applications that “support and network the HR profession”. This article focuses on the latter and especially on how to transform HR processes into the digital world with the help of cloud technology. This article is organised in the following way. The article opens with an overview of the evolution of e-HRM including the varying definitions of the terms itself. Subsequent, the impact on the academic research is depicted as well as the implications on the industry using e-HRM solutions. Challenges that arise when transforming HR into the digital world are discussed next. Based on this, a brief overview of project management approaches is depicted and a process model that matches the peculiar requirements of HR transformation projects into a cloud environment is derived. Next, a case study based on experiences from several transformation projects follows. The article finishes by discussing the implications of this article for researchers and practitioners.