Critical Analysis and Current Challenges Facing HRIS Adoption in Arab Countries - the Case of Saudi Arabia

Human Resource Management (HRM) system has become a necessity in the changing business technology services to meet global competition.  The organisations around the world are increasingly adopting Human Resource Information System (HRIS) to gather deeper insights into the nature and performance of their human resources as well as to identify the various different means to develop the quality of these resources. Moreover, HR is especially important in a knowledge-based Information Technology (IT). Information technology has permeated through a number of different fields of management during the recent years. Human resources management is once such field that has benefited immensely from the development in computing power and Internet capabilities. The centralised HR departments in multinational organisations attempt to monitor the performance of employees across geographical borders using scientific measures and also attempt to provide services to employees around the world using centralised systems, which help to standardise the HR practices and to reduce the costs associated with maintaining multiple HR departments. Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) help to accomplish these seemingly difficult tasks of centralised HR department in an easier manner.  The growing importance of HRIS is due to the recognition of HR practitioners that IT and IS should be a part of HR functions mainly to develop better HR programmes. Even though HRIS has been touted as a major development in the area of HRM, it is noted that there are some very important issues associated with the decision-making with respect to HRIS and the implementation of the system. Even though a number of researchers have focussed on the issues and problems faced by the organisations, it is noted that very few researchers have studied the special problems faced by developing organisations. HRIS, which was used originally by very large multinational companies, has now been adopted even by smaller organisation as it provides the benefits of scientific management of human resources.  This research attempts to study the various issues faced by the organisations in Arab countries . It also attempts to ascertain if the issues faced are different for small and large organisations. Primary research methodology is adopted to accomplish these objectives. Accordingly, a detailed process of data collection is undertaken to collect data from a range of participants who represented different organisations engaged in one of the four different kinds of businesses – IT, trading, manufacturing and services. It is noted that the problems faced by small organisations are quite different from those faced by the large organisations. Following conclusions are made on the basis of the data analysis.