HR in IT setups

I read this article
http://www.itpeopleindia.com/20040426/management2.shtml and it triggered off this blog; since it strongly resonates much of what I feel about the HR in IT today. I could not agree more with this article.

Increasingly, I observe that as organizations grow larger in size, somehow the "human" resource is treated like a "inhuman machine" that has no emotions & feelings, not meant to be respected, no value for their individual goals or satisfaction quotient and that should slog endlessly without complaining, that has no right to feel that they need work-life balance, that is meant to work to please the manager; and what's more the managers are becoming inhuman too to such an extent that they have no parameters of "rational humane judgement" and all this is supposedly very fair! Even computers and non-human assets in an IT setup are given their due downtime, and capacity managed so that they don't get overloaded and handled with more care than humans!

The "human" resource needs to be treated like a "human"; and this idea needs to be driven by some group of people if organizational growth has to also mean that organization behaviour is retained or improved.

What is the use of calling the HRD an HRD; if they cannot uphold the "humanness quotient" of the organization? The HRD of today is merely an administrative team that would be better called the "HR Backoffice". This backoffice today is mechanical in nature and can almost be managed automatically with the right tools, if configured properly and used well. HRD is ideally meant to go beyond being the HR backoffice in an IT setup, does it not feel the need to address the vital needs of it's customers i.e. the employees that make the organization an organization; who are basically "humans"?

Honestly, the time has come for HR in IT setups to move beyond this BAU administrative role with no teeth; where they are doing "regular, repetitive & outsourcable business processes" like recruiting, personnel adminstration and appraisals, satisfaction surveys (which god knows who analyses and takes cognizance of and works on the output of!) to a team that thinks and acts to fill this void - of a team that has the right to promote and reward right organizational culture, ethics and values, even identifying cases where management-policing may be needed & acting upon those, and become a team that understands employees as humans, that is concerned about organizational behaviour and humane empowerment - do thoughtful things that brainless & heartless automated software cannot; this is the dying need of today's IT world!