I am really excited to be attending the HR Tech Fest conference in Sydney at the beginning of December. I desperately wanted to go last year because the calibre of speakers was so high. But because of work constraints I just wasn’t able to do it. So this year I’m making up for lost time!

Over the last year or two I have found myself becoming more and more fascinated by people technology solutions and how they can help transform an HR offering within a business.

I love the fact that we are no longer looking at tools that are first and foremost “HR tools” and that today’s solutions are much more focused on the end user i.e. those in the business.

No longer just a place to store records and reduce paper, they now offer a cloud based interactive and collaborative approach to working and the best ones are fully mobile. How cool that you can carry your HRIS, your ATS, your payroll system and your big data around in your pocket!

Just about every aspect of HR can be delivered by mobile in a relatively inexpensive way – payroll, recruitment, learning, induction, HR admin, wellness, safety, surveys, performance, engagement, reporting etc.

And then there are predictive analytics – how can we harness all the information we can now access and then, by feeding into it some thoughts around the future political, environmental and economic landscape, come up with some future scenarios for our organisations and what the future landscape might look like?

The current issue is that no one system can do everything. And why should it – isn’t that old thinking? Isn’t that imposing an old road map on a new journey? Personally, I would rather have a best of breed for each solution that does one thing well, than have one system that tries to do everything and ends up not doing anything particularly well.

Obviously if these different tools can talk to each other more the better. And I can understand why bigger organisations want their payroll and HRIS connected. But for what purpose other than you update the information once only? I mean, what do most organisations ever do with the information anyway other than produce reports that no one reads?

Our thinking as a profession around what these tools do and how we use them needs to move on. So I am really looking forward to having my eyes opened even wider and finding some more in depth answers.

I am going to try and publish a few thoughts as I go along so watch this space and my Twitter feed on 1&2 December.