Despite corporations stripping budgets of extraneous spending, nearly two-thirds of companies polled by Towers Perrin said they are maintaining or increasing spending on technology to bolster their human resources department.
Stamford-based Towers Perrin consults on a range of issues affecting personnel departments, including compensation and insurance.
While 36 percent of companies surveyed by Towers Perrin indicated they were cutting spending on HR technology, 43 percent said they were maintaining their annual budgets on that front, and another 21 percent said they had upped their budget.
“Our study shows more and more companies view HR technologies and system budgets as must-have expenses,” Thomas Keebler, leader of Towers Perrin”™s global HR function effectiveness practice, said in a statement. “The proven value of these technologies and systems has made them less a discretionary cost decision and more an imperative, even in tougher times.”
Still, the number of organizations citing cost concerns over such systems nearly tripled to 24 percent, the first time in the 12-year history of the Towers Perrin survey that cost emerged as the most significant issue for respondents.
Until last year, concerns about systems implementation snags were the most-often cited worry for companies with new human-resources software and Web sites, but in 2008 “talent management” and work-force issues emerged as the top priority.
Perhaps predictably in this year”™s survey, recruiting and staffing systems had the largest year-over-year drop in importance among those surveyed.
