Human technology

I read an excerpt from a white paper recently that focused on intelligent organisational charting for human resources departments. It’s not a subject that close to my heart to be honest, but with my brother-in-law being in HR I thought I’d give it a glance. It got me thinking as to how far technology can extend into the modern workplace. I had always imagined my brother-in-law’s ‘personnel’-related duties to be mostly about interviewing candidates and job appraisals, not huge multi-layer data driven planning systems.

According to the white paper, intelligent organisational charts are a new breed of chart designed to drive increased productivity across the entire enterprise. The report revealed how organisations can navigate HR data from a secure and unified web-based organisation chart, extract HR analytics and conduct collaborative planning scenarios to model and optimise the workforce.

I guess this could be useful in mergers and acquisitions where major organisational challenges are taking place and human resource departments must make fast-paced, mission-critical decisions about the workforce that will affect merger success and stockholder value.

Well, so much for HumanConcepts and their white paper. The question is, I suppose, what’s the difference between the good old-fashioned term ‘personnel’ and the now much preferred label ‘human resources’. According to my brother-in-law. “About ten grand a year.” Ouch! Sorry.