The Innovation Imperative: How HR can Elevate its Business Impact -- Summary

Outsourcing to the right service provider can help a company transform its HR function, thereby improving the contribution its talent can make to its business performance.

Innovation lies at the core of competitive advantage. The HR function is well placed to foster a culture of innovation and, by extending beyond its traditional focus on HR administration, can help companies achieve high performance.

HR innovation means aligning the function with business strategy to work strategically, including coaching, mentoring and empowering a new generation of leaders.

The outsourcing of HR and learning can play a key role in helping the HR function innovate and thus play this more strategic role. At the most basic level, outsourcing can reduce the administrative burden of HR staff, but more importantly the right service provider can help inject continuous innovation into the organization, and help it climb a value ladder with three rungs:

1. Personnel control—managing talent for efficiency. The service partner can industrialize tasks such as payroll processing and benefits administration. This process will reduce costs, freeing HR to focus on more strategic activities.
   
   
2. People development—managing talent for effectiveness. Using the resources and capital freed up at the first stage, talent is managed to become highly effective. This way, the organization receives more value through improved output quality.
   
   
3. Talent multiplication—managing talent for power. Efficiency and quality gains are spread throughout the organization by empowered talent. HR is able to equip the workforce with the right knowledge, resources and freedom to deliver breakthrough advances—and power the organization toward achieving high performance.

Climbing the value ladder with a business process outsourcing (BPO) partner can thus help HR to help overcome long-term challenges that threaten companies of all sizes. One such challenge is succession planning, which is turning out to be a formidable one.

Companies in pursuit of high performance can outsource HR and learning to improve processes that make the most of the workforce, streamline training and incentivize creative action. HR will always be at the center of corporate culture, which is where the ability to achieve high performance is born. Inspiring the workforce to learn, collaborate and innovate empowers future leaders to achieve high performance and paves the way for growth in any climate.

John Higgins, senior director-Innovation Deployment for HR and Learning BPO Services, Accenture, serves as a liaison with the analyst community, HR and learning industry organizations, alliance partners and key clients. His current areas of focus and research include talent management analytics, mobile learning, integrated workflow learning and increasing the business impact of HR and learning.