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Gaining Competitive Advantage through Human Resources Management
Thought Leadership Summit on Digital Strategies
March 1, 2005 - Orlando, FL

CIOs and other senior execs from Cargill, Cisco, Eastman Chemical, Eaton, Hasbro, IBM, and SYSCO were joined by academics from Tuck, Wharton, and Emory for this roundtable. This event was the ninth summit in the Thought Leadership Summit on Digital Strategies series.

Press Release
PDF (81K)

Agenda
PDF (92K)

List of Participants
PDF (77K)

Discussion Guide
PDF (81K)

Overview Article
PDF (331K)

The human resources (HR) function must reshape itself to deliver the strategic value that today's business environment demands and refocus its energies to become a change catalyst and leader.

HR's challenge is to develop and implement a technology strategy linked tightly to the business strategy. An efficient, technology-enabled HR organization can shape corporate culture, spread best practices, and drive enterprise-wide consistency of important shared values and messages.

In bringing together leading CIOs and their corresponding HR senior executives, this roundtable produced the following key observations:

  1. HR and IT must jointly leverage their unique cross-enterprise views with technology to increase companies' flexibility and adaptability, drive enterprise-wide transparency, and provide 'high-touch' experiences where and when they are really needed.

  2. HR can play a major role in talent management and development, and help to create a performance and accountability culture via IT-enabled compensation systems, opt-out programs, recruiting, and continuous learning processes.

  3. Both HR and IT can benefit from sharing 'embedded' talent with each others' organizations and with other business functions: this cross-pollination of managerial talent and perspectives can help increase understanding, cooperation and goal alignment.

  4. In addition to empowering employees and managers, IT-enabled HR systems can also deliver new managerial insight by aggregating and leveraging data that were previously inaccessible.

  5. In making outsourcing and automation decisions, HR executives must understand what's strategic and value-added to the business and what's not, and let those distinctions drive the design of new processes and programs.


To link to the Thought Leadership Summit on Digital Strategies website, click here.