Winning Strategies for Achieving Your Enterprise Application Goals

Over the last two decades of conducting our Annual HR Systems Survey, we’ve observed a very real transition in how organizations adopt, deploy, and value their HR applications. Originally enterprise software was implemented to automate cumbersome, paper-based processes—back office tools meant to have little or no interaction with employees. New enterprise HR applications are not only designed to be employee centric, but also viewed as valuable assets in an organization’s strategic planning process. These consumerized HR applications are built on secure, cloud infrastructures with data-driven analytics, 24/7 accessibility, and highly configurable workflows.

Despite these exciting new industry changes, replacing existing enterprise applications that require costly financial investments and customizations isn’t on every organization’s priority list. In fact, the Sierra-Cedar 2018–2019 HR Systems Survey White Paper reports that 40% of organizations have some form of On-Premise HR application still in use, and more than half of those organizations have no plans to make a change in the next 24 months.

Have these organizations given up on competing with modern HR functions? Are they unable to achieve the enterprise application goals set by their business leaders? Absolutely not! There’s more than one way to reach a goal, and our year-over-year research has identified multiple pathways organizations are taking to transform their HR Technology environments into invaluable strategic resources. We found that 31% of organizations with no plans to change their HR applications today are already on Hybrid HR Technology environments, leveraging the best of both worlds in their strategies. Over 40% of organizations with no plans to change are leveraging portal technologies, third-party mobile updates, or applications like PeopleSoft Fluid to enhance their existing On-Premise user experience, accessibility, or data governance capabilities. Another 16% of organizations are externally hosting their original On-Premise applications to reduce hardware and maintenance efforts.

These organizations are figuring out ways to achieve business outcomes similar to their peers while working within the realities of their existing technology priorities. Another approach to achieving organizational goals is to look beyond the technology itself: in many cases, it isn’t what technology you have, but rather how your organization is using the applications. For the fifth year in a row, our research has found the highest level of business outcomes are more closely aligned to clear strategies, adoption practices, and continuous change management efforts than any other practices.

If you are interested in learning more about practices that are aligned with better business outcomes and how HR and IT organizations are working together to achieve their enterprise application goals, then join us for the first of our four-part webinar series, Sierra-Cedar PeopleSoft Playbook: Winning Strategies for Today and Tomorrow.