INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY- A REVOLUTION IN HRM

Er. Upasana Kanchan

Asstt. Professor,
Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management & Technology
29, theatre road, cantonment area, Bareilly-243001
Ph- 09411469220
E-mail-id: kanchan_upasana@yahoo.com

Today, Information technology has totally transformed our lives. It has changed the way we
communicate, how we learn, how we work and spend free time, in short – it has more or less changed
every aspect of human society one can think of. Developments in the field of IT have shape up the way the
HR function is performed in organizations. Over the past 5-10 years, HRM functions sought to play more
strategic role in their organizations and this requires eliminating transactional tasks in order to free up
time to focus on traditional & transformational activities.
Purpose: The use of information technology can both make HR more strategic and by doing so
increase the value that HR adds to the business. This paper deals with the use of information technology
and internet for better human resource management. The recent and inevitably coming changes in the
various areas of human resource management like staffing, motivating and leading has been observed in
this study. The paper answers to what actually is e-HRM and what are the objectives of e-HRM? How e-
HRM can help an organization in improving its performance & cost reduction?

Design/methodology/approach –To answer the above mentioned questions, I reviewed a broad range of
published works on e-HRM and Information technology. I try to assert the present situation of HR
functions in the companies and outline the promising trends in this area. Finally, combining that with
elements of human resource management we try to predict basic consequences that IT will have on the
way employees are rewarded and the way new employees are acquired.
Findings: The study explores that information technology has completely reengineered the HR
departments of many organizations. Major areas of HR like, recruitment & selection, training &
development, compensation, motivation are being handled electronically. E-HRM has led to the
reduction in cost as well as in processing time. Use of internet and e-mail has improved the way & speed
of communication among employees as well as between organization & customers. E-HRM obviously
seems to be generally accepted and sometimes even preferred to conventional HRM. Attitudes of
individual actors then seem to pose at least no general problem for e-HRM.
Originality/value: This paper and its conclusions add to the debate on the importance of information
technology for HRM in an organization, by specifying various uses of IT in different areas of HR.
Limitations: one of the limitations of the study is the limited availability of literature in the field of E-
HRM. Since the paper is based on the secondary data available in the published sources like studies
published in refereed journals, books, conference proceedings and working papers, limited availability of
theory was a constraint for the research.
Key words: Human Resource Management, Electronic Human Resource Management, Internet &
Information Technology.