Abstract:The "war for talent" is still on. Annually conducted surveys have indicated for years that one third of all organizations are unable to fill vacant job positions with suitable candidates. Responding to these and other challenges, human resource management (HRM) is expected to transform itself. General opinion holds that the HRM transformation has just begun and that the potential of IT in HRM is not yet fully exploited. Examining the value potential of IT in HRM, existing IS research predominately studies the impact of IT on HRM. We contribute by examining the reverse impact in three steps. First, we use Thompson's theory of organizations in action to examine the expected impact of the HRM transformation on IT ("to-be" situation). Second, we use Kohli and Grover's IT value typology and review 20 years of the publication history ("as-is" situation). Finally, we relate expectations to actual review findings. We find that the HRM transformation should lead to a major shift in technology type used in organizations. However, this shift is not recognized yet, which is why our literature review reveals considerable unaddressed value potential of IT in HRM. We finish the paper by outlining IS research avenues in the context of HRM.

No abstract

Trained personnel are crucial for success in a knowledge society. Unsurprisingly, e-learning is expected to provide more than operational efficiency in organizations, which it did in the academic context, but did not in the corporate context. This research proposal argues that human motivation is the key difference between the two contexts. Social software seems to positively impact motivation, but how and which social software features to implement in a corporate e-learning context is still unknown. Hence, this research hypothesizes and analyzes the impact of social software features on user motivation to participate. It develops a model explaining why social software impacts motivation and ultimately uses experiments embedded in a design science approach to explain how and which social software features to implement in a given context. This proposal details this approach and provides intermediate findings in the quest for personnel motivation and corporate e-learning success.