| Abstract: | The purpose of this study is to assess the practice and challenges of Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) in the case of Commercial Banks of Ethiopia focusing on the head office. In doing this, the study has adopted a mixed methods research approach. Structured questionnaire was developed and distributed in addition to open-ended interview questions conducted with key informants. A sample of 113 employees out of 156 employees working in the head offices have been participated in filling the distributed closed-ended questionnaires and five management and software developers were interviewed too. This study used a descriptive type of research that sets out to assess HRIS practices and challenges in CBE. All the five variables were properly described and analyzed and; as per the general findings from both questionnaires and interview techniques, HRIS application is properly becoming operational and practiced at the head office of CBE. Generally the research findings have indicated that the HRIS enables CBE to automate all HR activities; promotes efficiency and effectiveness, integrate all HR tasks; enables the bank to perform all HR activities end to end via automated and interrelated systems. It also enables to access employee data from anywhere; changes tiresome manual work to automation and automates HR recruitment and documentation activities. In addition, the HRIS of the bank is user friendly in the sense that employees perform operations and access the required HR data easily. However, the findings of the study show that various challenges limited the HRIS of the bank. Lack of awareness to feed timely data, network interruption, knowledge gap to properly execute the system and complicated policy and procedures to customize the system add their share to problem. In order to automate HR division transactions, the current system is capable to handle about 80% and above. As recommendation, on-the-job training program should be facilitated, systems should also be timely updated and the network speed and capacity of the nation should be improved and the skill gap has to be properly filled. |
