by Dave Weisbeck
HR Transformation was first proposed by Dave Ulrich in 1995, and at the time it was a revolutionary idea.
Concepts like COEs, HRBPs, and HR Shared services were ahead of their time, and have since become the standard for how HR departments are structured. Organizations deploying this model, or some variant, expect this transformation will lead to impactful business results, but in practice, this hasn’t been the case.
One of the underlying problems is that HR Transformation has too often resulted in inwardly focused process optimizations–how do we run HR better–and that does little to empower other departments in the business, let alone the managers and executives who are expecting to see the outcomes of transformational change.