Does Technology drive what we do instead of enabling it?

In 2007 the first generation iPhone was launched. It took two years for Samsung to respond with their own smart phone offering. Since then we have seen the rise of tablets, the launch of the smart watches and you can now pay for your shopping with your mobile phone. Now it seems there is always a new product being launched, but a piece of technology can be exciting and innovative one day and out of date the next. As consumers this is the world we now live in but the corporate world is struggling to keep up, often finding that processes and work can actually be prohibited by systems rather than enabled.  

For a good 40+ years the business world remained fairly constant and largely leaps and bounds ahead of the consumer when it came to technology. Organisations were generally very structured and process driven with little change or innovation to contend with. As times have progressed and advancements in technologies have become more and more rapid, it has become more difficult, particularly for large scale businesses, to be nimble and agile enough to keep up with the changes, particularly because of the huge costs that are associated with upgrading company systems and technologies. Instead, add-ons to existing systems to “make do” and act as a band aid to technological issues are implemented as short term solutions. As a result many businesses have ended up with complex and unwieldy systems that are incredibly complex, inefficient and hard to unravel.

From an HR perspective technology is an important tool to enable employee engagement. Technology should be liberating not limiting, but so often businesses allow technology to drive what they do rather than enabling it. HR technology has traditionally operated in a bubble, when in fact it should have synergy with other company and financial systems to ensure consistency across the business, which in turn can drive productivity, create efficiencies and build an agile and profitable organisation.