The future of HR and information capability

Purpose - In the midst of the information revolution, HR departments tend to focus their information agenda on HR departmental activities. The paper examines the impact that HR departments have when, instead, they focus their information agenda on improving the organization's information capability. Design/methodology/approach – Our findings are based on the 2016 offering of the Human Resource Competency study that is sponsored by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and the RBL Group. The data set consists of over 36,000 respondents from around the world. Data were gathered through a 360 methodology that includes self-ratings and HR and non-HR associate ratings. Findings Our findings show that HR’s involvement in leveraging business information has more impact than any other HR department activity on creating value for key external stakeholders. When controlling for other HR activities our analysis shows that 77.4% of HR total impact on customer value and 55.6% of shareholder value o...