Alan Susi, Director of People at S&P Global - Building Your HR Tech Stack

Alan Susi is a Director of People at S&P Global with more than a decade of experience building people strategies that hold up under organizational change. On Reimagining Company Culture, he sat down with us to talk about what HR technology actually does for a workforce, and where most leaders go wrong when they try to build a stack that looks impressive on paper but does very little for the humans inside the company.

The conversation centered on a question every people leader is wrestling with right now. How do you choose technology that serves your culture rather than dictating it? Alan walked through what he has learned from supporting a major merger, scaling people programs across geographies, and building business-partner muscle inside an HR function. The answer he keeps returning to is that tools are downstream of strategy, and strategy is downstream of clarity about what kind of organization you want to be.

Why HR Tech Stacks Get Bloated and Underused

HR tech buying often starts with a problem and ends with a vendor list, and that is part of the issue. According to Gartner, only 29 percent of employees today believe HR understands what they need and want, which suggests that buying more software is rarely the answer. A new platform purchased to fix engagement, performance, or recruiting can sit unused or actively annoy employees if it lands inside a fuzzy strategy.

Alan described the trap clearly. People leaders see a flashy product demo, get excited about a single feature, and skip the harder work of asking whether the underlying process is broken or just slow. The result is a stack of tools that overlap, contradict each other, and require employees to enter the same information in three different systems. Workers notice. According to Gartner research, 88 percent of HR leaders say their organizations have not realized significant business value from AI tools. That is not a technology problem. That is a strategy problem dressed up in software.

Alan's view is that an HR tech stack should mirror the workforce planning story you are trying to tell. If your priority is internal mobility, your data and learning systems matter most. If your priority is compliance, your case management and reporting layers matter most. The tools that make the cut should support that order of operations.

How Should HR Leaders Choose What to Build, Buy, or Kill?

What is the test for keeping a tool in the stack?

Alan applies a simple test. If the tool does not measurably improve a decision a manager or employee has to make, it should be on the chopping block. Storage and reporting alone are not enough. The tool needs to surface insight at the moment of action. That is the difference between data that sits in a dashboard and data that changes how a one-on-one goes the next morning.

How do you avoid duplicating systems during a merger?

Mergers are where HR stacks go to die. Two performance systems, three payroll vendors, and a learning platform that nobody can log into. Alan's approach is to start with the employee experience and work backward. Map the moments that matter from offer to exit, then ask which system owns each moment. The systems that do not own a moment can usually be retired without anyone noticing.

What Actually Works When Building People Systems

Anchor every tool to a business outcome

Alan argued that HR teams should be able to answer one question for every system they own. What business decision does this tool make better? If the answer is vague, the budget is in danger. SHRM research found that recruiting, employee experience, and leadership development sit at the top of HR priorities. A people tech stack should make at least one of those measurably easier.

Treat data as a service, not a destination

The People analytics conversation often gets stuck on dashboards. Alan's framing is that data should travel to the people who can act on it, in the format they can act on. A manager does not need a 12-tab report. They need a one-line nudge that says this team member has not had a development conversation in 90 days. That is what a useful HR data layer looks like.

Buy for the next two years, not the last two

Vendors love to sell to the problems leaders had during the last hiring cycle. Alan pushes his teams to forecast where the workforce is heading and to choose tools that will hold up there. That includes thinking about how AI will reshape recruiting, how skills-based hiring will reshape mobility, and how compliance requirements will tighten in the next reporting cycle.

Where Employee Relations Fits in the Stack

HR tech conversations often skip past employee relations entirely, which is a mistake. ER is where the consequences of every other people decision come home. A bad performance review, a misfired comp adjustment, or a poorly handled investigation all land in an ER queue. The right systems matter. AllVoices builds employee relations infrastructure that gives HR a single place to track issues, surface trends, and act before things escalate. Inside that, our HR case management product gives investigators consistent workflows, audit trails, and reporting that holds up to scrutiny.

How does ER software fit alongside the rest of the stack?

Alan's framing applies cleanly here. ER software belongs in the stack when it improves a decision a person has to make. That decision might be whether to escalate, whether to involve legal, or whether a pattern across teams is signaling something bigger. A tool that simply stores cases is not enough. A tool that helps you connect a complaint today to a similar one filed eight months ago is the difference between reactive HR and proactive HR.

Frequently Asked Questions About HR Tech Stacks

What is an HR tech stack?

An HR tech stack is the connected set of software systems a people team uses across the employee lifecycle. It typically includes core HRIS, payroll, recruiting, learning, performance, engagement, and case management tools. The strongest stacks are integrated around a clear strategy, not stitched together by accident.

How many tools should be in a typical stack?

There is no right number. A 200-person company might run cleanly on five or six well-chosen platforms, while a global enterprise might need 20 or more to handle regional payroll and compliance. The better question is whether each tool earns its place by improving a real decision.

How often should HR teams audit their tech stack?

An annual audit is the floor. Many leaders do a quarterly check on usage data and renewal timelines. The audit should review adoption rates, employee feedback, integration health, and whether the tool still maps to current priorities.

Who should own HR tech buying decisions?

Buying should be a partnership between HR, IT, finance, and the business owners closest to the use case. HR owns the strategy and the employee experience, IT owns the integration and security posture, and finance owns the unit economics. Skipping any of those voices leads to expensive mistakes.

How do you measure ROI on HR technology?

Tie each tool to a measurable outcome. Time-to-fill for recruiting tools, retention for onboarding tools, case resolution time for ER tools, and adoption rates for learning tools. If a system has been live for 12 months and you cannot point to a number that has moved, the tool is not earning its keep.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Alan's perspective is a useful corrective for any people team that has been told technology will save them. It will not. Technology can amplify a thoughtful people strategy or it can amplify a confused one. The work of building a people function that holds up under change is mostly human work, supported by tools that earn their place.

The leaders who get this right share a few habits. They start with the business question. They keep the employee experience at the center. They retire tools that stop earning their keep. And they treat HR data as something that should move toward decisions, not pile up in dashboards. That posture builds a stack that scales when the business changes, instead of one that fights the business at every turn.

See how AllVoices fits into a people tech stack that actually works.