ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the major stages in the historical development of Human resources (HR) technologies. To understand the nature of current problems with HR technology, it is necessary first to understand something of how HR technology solutions have evolved. Many of the problems routinely encountered in HR systems have their roots in design and development problems that relate to older technologies and which no longer need be a constraint on the organization. The beginnings of HR technology arose with the need to process large numbers of employee payslips which, prior to the 1960s, was predominantly a manual or clerical exercise. The advent of large mainframe applications to process payroll calculations and generate paper payslips on a large scale was, for most organizations, the first major application of technology to an HR-related problem. The development of the personal computer and related trends in computing such as client-server architectures unleashed a whole new set of computing possibilities for HR.
