HR OperationsConnected data is not yet connected HR
A central dashboard can bring information together. It does not automatically prevent processes from repeatedly having to reconstruct the same reality.
Björn Slegers ·
HR has more data today than ever before. Yet a large part of our daily work remains remarkably familiar.
Checking a contract. Verifying which role someone had when a decision was made. Finding out if a change was already active when the payroll was closed. Looking up what was agreed during the previous meeting in another system. The information exists. Just not always in the same reality. That is an important distinction.
Bringing data together afterwards is not the same as connecting it along the way
In recent years, many organisations have rightly invested in data warehouses, reporting and BI. They make information more accessible. They allow us to compare data from different sources. They enable better reporting. But they do not automatically solve one fundamental problem. If each HR process continues to create its own context, you are reconstructing the organisation after the fact.
Recruitment knows something that onboarding does not. Performance uses a job context that reward interprets differently. Payroll only receives a change when its process is almost closed. A dashboard can recreate a single picture of this after the fact. But how much work has already been done in the meantime to piece reality back together?
We believe this is an underestimated form of inefficiency. Not necessarily in a single bad process. But in the space between processes.
Context does not need to follow everywhere. But it should not simply disappear either.
When a candidate becomes an employee, of course, not all information from Recruitment needs to be carried over to their personnel file. That would not only be unnecessary, but in some cases undesirable. But relevant professional context should not automatically disappear just because a workflow has administratively ended.
The role for which someone was hired. The level at which they started. Agreements that were crucial for the contract. Context that will be needed again later for performance, development or reward. The same applies when an employee moves internally. If a role changes, performance should not be using a different reality months later than payroll or compensation.
That is why, for us, integration means something different from having systems send as much data to each other as possible. The more interesting question is whether relevant context is retained.
The hidden cost often lies in reconstruction
Part of HR efficiency is easily visible. How much time does a payroll run take? How long does onboarding take? How many manual steps are there in Recruitment? Harder to see is the time people spend on reconstruction. Just checking again. Quickly emailing someone. Finding the previous version. Checking which date was correct.
Figuring out why an exception exists. On their own, these seem like small actions. At scale, they become a way of working. And perhaps, in the years to come, this will become a more important criterion for HR technology than the number of features on a module screen. Not how much functionality is present.
But how much reality is lost along the way.