What's up with HRO vendors revisited.
As sort of a follow-up to my last post on HR Consultancies, here's an interesting article about HRO and the wisdom of single sourcing your entire HR relationship to one vendor. I'm not actually sure that you can put all of your eggs in one basket, but you sure can put alot of them there.
Take for example Hewitt. So you give them HR call center, HR administration, benefit administration, retiree administration, payroll services, and they implement Cyborg HR for you. They don't have the greatest talent aquisition, so they partner or you choose someone else. Then you have succession planning, and learning, etc... Go with the best in class.
I think it's a great advantage to be able to outsource and strategize with a single partner who understands your business better than anyone else. Then you pull in a few point solutions that are best in class and wrap the whole thing together with a self service portal like Plumtree in the front end and a data warehouse like Cognos on the back end.
The point being, its ok to have one huge vendor doing most of your stuff. Integrate the core functions that are critical to have in a centralized database. Piece out the rest. Same with sourcing - you don't want to have 20 vendors pointing fingers when something goes wrong. But when you can get the number down to a single partner with 3-5 other vendors, you're in good shape. Technology allows us to create integration points we could not manage 10 years ago.
