Dive Brief:

• After years of cuts, HR organizations are expecting to see marginal increases in both staff and budgets in 2015.
• But HR organizations are largely unprepared to help improve enterprise agility and address issues most relevant to achieving business objectives, including workforce strategy, innovation, and talent management in the context of changing business needs, according to a new report.
• Companies are struggling to improve in several key HR strategy areas, the research found, and are focusing transformation efforts in the areas of talent, technology, and analytics. 

Dive Insight:

Newly-released HR Key Issues research from The Hackett Group reports that a clear dichotomy is emerging in the area of digital transformation of the HR function, including adoption of cloud technology – with the best prepared HR groups moving forward aggressively while typical organizations fall behind.

Also, the report found that in order to deal more effectively with high levels of market volatility, uncertainty, risk and competition, enterprises are seeking to improve agility in 2015 and beyond. To enable agility and innovation, The Hackett Group believes that HR organizations should begin with a focus on operational excellence, allowing them to free up resources that can be dedicated to strategic activities such as talent management and analytics.

As HR develops a core competency around talent and analytics, it provides the business with better insights into skills gaps, critical jobs, and employee performance, so that adjustments can be made as necessary.