Information Technology and Human Resource Management in China

1、information technology and human resource management in china dai weihui, su jianmin and fu luminginformation technology and human resource management in chinadai weihui and su jianmine-mail: dwh001, tel: +86-21-65645597, fax: +86-21-65103060(school of management, fudan university, shanghai 200433,

2、p.r.china)fu luminge-mail: flm001, tel: +86-21-65101184, fax: +86-21-65101184(shanghai billow information science and technology co. ltd, room 1-219 guofu road no.50, shanghai 200433, p.r.china)abstract: china is currently transforming from plan-economy to market-economy, and will join the wto to be

3、come a member of the global economy family. chinese enterprises are taking great changes in organization, business process, and management to meet the new opportunities and challenges. as the most important and strategic resources in the era of knowledge economy, human resources have been more remar

4、kable than ever before in todays society. with the help of developing information technology and internet, human resource management is experiencing a deep renovation in theory, methodology and skills. in this paper, the authors will give an outline on current situation of chinas human resource mana

5、gement, analyze the main problems and new trends in the reform of chinas hrm, and introduce how information technologies are helping chinese government and enterprises to change their management on human resources.this paper is divided into four parts: part i gives an outline on current situation of

6、 chinas hrm including in the human resource holdings, market, training and social security, and discuss the problems arising from the human resource quality, market mechanism, social security system and governmental policies; part ii discusses the new trends in chinas hrm, highlighting some new rese

7、arch directions in human resource strategies, performance assessments, inciting scheme and restricting scheme, and group analysis; part iii introduces the application of information technology and information system in hrm, giving the examples of on-line hrms, e-hrms, and decision support system in

8、china. part iv is a summary of this paper.key words: hrm; information technology; information system1. current situation of chinas human resource management1.1 human resource holdings and qualityaccording to the statistics on the fifth population census report of china (nov. 1st, 2000), china had th

9、e total population of 12.953 hundreds of millions and the total employed persons of 7.059 hundreds of millions. the distribution of population by educational level is as fig. 1. we adopt the percent of human capital holdings in total human resource holdings to descript the human resource quality:her

10、e, nh: number of natural human force holdings, is equal to the sum of population with age over 16 years old,lc: labor force coefficient, is decided by the age, sex, health, education and skills of labor force,hc: number of human capital holdings, is the product of nh multiplied by lc,hr: number of h

11、uman resource holdings, is the sum of nh plus hc.only considering the educational factor, we let lc be 2.98, 1.92, 1.28 and 0.60 if labor force has the educational level of college (and higher level), senior secondary school, junior secondary school and primary school respectively. lc is zero for th

12、ose who have only the educational level below primary school. the human resource holdings and quality in china are as table 1:table 1. holdings and quality of hr in chinanhhchrhcp976.04 millions921.04 millions1,897.08 millions48.55%although china has enormous human resources, but the quality of chin

13、as hr is still very low, only 3.53% of chinas population have college (and higher) educational level, and the percent of human capital holdings in total hr holdings is 48.55%, which is far behind that of u.s.a. (67.50% in 1994) and canada (62.76% in 1991) .1.2 human resource marketemployed persons i

14、n china are distributed into three categories of units: state-owned units, urban collective owned units and other ownership units (including in private enterprises, foreign funded units and self-employed units, etc.). since the beginning of 1990s, hr flows in china have been shown two trends: 1) fro

15、m state-owned units and urban collective units to other ownership units; and 2) from primary industry and secondary industry to tertiary industry. from the year of 1995 to 2000, the proportions of employed persons among three categories of units had been changed from 73.48%, 20.63%, 5.89% to 69.96%,

16、 12.85%, 17.19% (see fig. 2), and the proportions among primary industry, secondary industry and tertiary industry had been changed from 52.2%, 23.0%, 24.8% to 50.0%, 22.5%, 27.5%, owing to the rapid growth of private enterprises and self-employed units, also to the development of information servic

17、e industry. to build up the human resource configuration mechanism, china had established 2,445 hr markets and 4,506 hr service agents by the end of 1998. more than 2.6 millions of professionals were employed with the help of hr markets, especially 65% of them were employed by other ownership units

18、in the year of 1999. china will bring forth some new policies to promote the hr markets in the near future: 1) open to foreign funded hr agents; 2) reform on the regulations of registered permanent residence; 3) encouragement on “flexible flowing” of professionals; 4) development of national hr data

19、base and hr e-market.1.3 human resource training and social securityhuman resource training and social security are hard work and long-time tasks in china. due to the transformation on economy and the adjustment in industry structure, the registered unemployment rate in urban areas reached 3.1% and

20、6.57 millions of staff and workers in state-owned units had been laid off by the end of year 2000. to overcome the structural unemployment problems, china had begun the “re-obtain employment training engineering” several years ago. in the year of 2000, 8.96 millions of persons had been trained in 15

21、 thousands of social training organizations, and 2.26 millions of them obtained new employment. some career training centers are applying the e-training systems to offer standard career training for unemployed persons.chinas social security for employed persons includes in social pension insurance,

22、social medical insurance, jobless insurance, injury insurance and birth insurance (only for female staff and workers).table 2. chinas social security for staff and workers (urban areas) in 2000coverage(persons)percent of coverage to all related personsincome(rmb ￥)payout(rmb ￥)pension insurance136.1

23、8 millions89.97%22.81 billions21.22 billionsmedical insurance(by new policies)43.32 millions29.94%1.73 billions1.20 billionsjobless insurance104.08 millions92.43%1.60 billions1.21 billionsinjury insurance43.50 millions38.63%0.25 billions0.14 billionsbirth insurance30.02 millions65.08%0.11 billions0.

24、08 billionsin recent years, expenditure on medical cares have been increased rapidly and become a heavy burden in governments finance. since 1994, chinese government has begun the reform on social medical insurance to expand its coverage, adjust the policies, and perfect the management system.fig.3i

25、s the distribution of expenditure on medical cares vs. age , in which the real line curve is the standard distribution that was calculated from statistics considering the relationship between physiological health and age, also the structure and price level of medical consumptions in china. we can ob

26、viously find that expenditure on medical cares for those people with age below 45 years old is less than the standard level, but inversely the expenditure for people with age over 55 years old is far more than the standard level. it shows that the current policies on chinas social medical cares are

27、not reasonable, and offer insufficient security for young people but excessive security for old people. excessive security on social medical cares will easily led to moral hazards and the waste of medical consumptions. in fact, it has become a serious problem in chinas medical insurance.2. new trend

28、s in chinas human resources managementinformation technology and economic globalization are bringing about a great revolution in china while transforming from plan-economy to market-economy. chinese enterprises are taking great changes in organization, business process and management. as the most im

29、portant and strategic resources in the era of knowledge economy, hrm has become a very hot point both in academe and in enterprises today. we will hereby introduce some new research directions in chinas hrm.2.1 alignment between business strategies and hr strategiesowing to great changes in external

30、 environment, most of chinese enterprises are re-thinking their business strategies. hr strategies will often follow the business strategies and provide strong support for the transformation on business strategies. table 3 lists the popular business strategies and their corresponding human resources

31、 strategies. table 3. basic competitive strategies and their corresponding hr strategiesbusiness strategyhr strategiescost leadership strategyl job descriptionl technique and skill trainingl compensation based on production and qualitydifferentiation strategyl training on innovation and flexibility

32、l training on work teaml employment of part-time professionals from outsidealliance strategyl job descriptionl cooperation training between different organizationsl virtual company and e-hrm2.2 performance assessmentperformance assessments on hr are usually obtained from both sides of object and sub

33、ject, but some indices reflecting the performance are difficult to be quantitatively measured. to overcome this problem we adopt a kpi (key performance indicator) method, replacing the requirements on performance with a series of behavior standards that can be measurable and are regarded as the indi

34、cators of performance. the smart (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bounded) principle forms the basis of establishing kpi. china has applied kpi methods to performance assessments of the employees for governments:fig. 4 the flow-chat of performance assessmentperformance of hr is

35、usually regarded as a polyhedron in multi-dimension space, thus we utilize the 360° assessment method to obtain the overall views on it.2.3 inciting scheme and restricting schemea principal-agent model may be applied to describe the agency relationship between shareholders and managers, also em

36、ployers and employees. fig. 5 is the agency chain in chinas state-owned enterprises. fig. 5 the agency chain in chinas state-owned enterprisesmoral hazard (mh) and adverse selection (as) are typical problems arising from such relationships because of 1) conflicts in objectives, 2) differences in att

37、itude to risks, and 3) information asymmetry. inciting scheme and restricting scheme are applied to overcome these problems.fig. 6 screening scheme to asfig. 7 inciting scheme and restricting scheme to mh2.4 group configuration and efficiencysome new research trends on hrm are focused on the decisio

38、n-making groups in modern business organizations, such as group performance assessment, group structure analysis, group configuration and optimization, and group efficiency. supported by national natural science foundation of china (no. 70102004, “research on the efficiency of enterprise core decisi

39、on-making group based on multi-agent model and its applications”), we studied the structure, configuration and efficiency of decision-making groups from 2,700 chinese enterprises in shanghai aiming to find the relationship between the group efficiency and its related factors and to give an optimizat

40、ion in structure, configuration and operational mechanism for the core decision-making groups in modern business organizations, especially for high-tech companies.the individual attributes of persons in a group are described as a vector in the space of five dimensions: the variables a, s, e, r, p re

41、fer to age, sex, education, experience and performance respectively. supposing the group efficiency can be defined as the compound function:where is the vector decided by group structure, and is the vector decided by group configuration that reflecting the positions of persons in the group.we study

42、three kinds of questions:1) what is the optimalto maximize e, when and are given?2) what is the optimalto maximize e, when and are given?3) what is the optimalto maximize e, when and are given?for example, the optimal group structure of computer software companies with the employed persons from 30 t

43、o 100 are as fig. 8 and fig. 9.fig. 8 optimal group structure in manager numberfig. 9 optimal group structure in ageto observe the dynamic change in performance and efficiency of typical core decision-making groups in modern business organizations, we have presented the multi-agent model based on ar

44、tificial intelligence technology, in which every agent is a procedure of computer software that has been designed to have the intelligent capacity and biological behavior as human beings, and may be taken as a “real” human in the decision-making groups. further research results will be reported afte

45、r some months.3. information technology in chinas human resources management3.1 on-line hrmswith the help of information and internet, hrm has broken the barriers of time and geography. by the end of 2000, china had established more than four hundreds of on-line human resource management systems bas

46、ed on internet by the government and hr agents, and had stored 27.6 millions items of hr information. a national hr database is under construction, which belongs to one part of the national information center. on-line hrms can provide people for:l job seeking wherever and wheneverl 360° measure

47、ment on performance assessmentsl career training wherever and wheneverl on-line interviewl on-line data mining and on-line analysisl real-time record of work and behaviors3.2 e-hrme-hrm can support almost all aspects of hrm based on information system and internet, and has become one of the necessar

48、y conditions for global business and distributed hrm in todays world, especially in virtual companies.fig. 10 ehrm system for china haier stock companywith the help of ehrm system, china haier stock company has obtained great advantages on global competition. 3.3 decision support system for hrmdecis

49、ion support system has been applied to hrm in china, and are providing advanced analysis and decision support functions for decision-making group. fig.11 is the framework of dss for shanghai pudong new zone government. obtain data obtain data maintenance on obtain data, models dss resources & kn

50、owledge user interfaceindividual ass.group ass.group struct.group config.maintenance.dss resourcesbaseinterfacemisdbextern-al datarept. for individual.rept. for groupoptimization on group structure and config.fig. 11 dss for shanghai pudong new zone governmentthis system runs centered on the dss res

51、ource bases that includes in database, model base and knowledge base, and has been integrated with a hr management information system. it can help decision-making group in:l performance assessment and performance forecast for individualsl performance assessment and performance forecast for groupsl o

52、ptimization analysis of group structure and group configurationl multi-dimension analysis of hrl trend analysis of hr distributionl data mining and data modelingl knowledge management on hr4. summaryinformation technology and economic globalization are leading to a great revolution in china while tr

53、ansforming from plan-economy to market-economy. human resources have become the most important and strategic resources to obtain competitive advantages on long-continuing development in future knowledge economy. chinese government is undertaking the long-time tasks and hard work to improve the human

54、 resource quality, push the hr market, speed up the hr training and perfect the social security system. the alignment between business strategies and hr strategies, kpi and 360° performance assessment, inciting scheme and restricting scheme, and group analysis technology are some of the new research directions in chinas hrm. with the help of information technology and internet, hrm has broken the barriers of time and geography, a new generation of human