From HRIS Sprawl To A Clear Tech Roadmap with Matthew Hamilton

Your HR tech stack can feel like a living creature: new tools arrive, contracts renew, integrations sprawl, and suddenly you are paying multiple vendors for the same capability. We wanted a grounded conversation on how to regain control, so Bill Banham brought back Matthew Hamilton, VP of People Analytics and HRIS at Protective Life, to talk about building a guiding HR tech strategy that actually drives decisions when the pressure is on.

We dig into why consolidation is not automatically the goal and how the real win is finding the right balance between an all-in-one platform and a maze of point solutions. Matthew shares how his team sets a clear vision, then makes it actionable with guiding principles that serve as a North Star when leaders disagree. From there, we get specific about what to document in your HR technology roadmap: a clear inventory of vendors and capabilities, centralized visibility into spend, an ecosystem map that reveals overlap, and a long-range plan built around subscription renewals so you do not accidentally box yourself into bad timing.

If RFPs have ever felt like a procurement checkbox exercise, you will like this part. We talk about owning the process inside HR, partnering effectively with procurement and IT security, and writing capability-based requirements that invite better vendor responses without creating a 900-item monster. We also cover how to build an HR tech business case and ROI story that resonates with executives by tying benefits to what matters most right now: cost savings, reduced complexity, employee experience, better analytics, and risk control. Plus, Matthew shares how market research resources and even generative AI tools like Microsoft Copilot can help validate a shortlist faster.

If you want to stop being a passenger in HRIS and HR tech decisions, listen, subscribe, share this with your HR leadership team, and leave a review so more HR pros can find the show.

Transcript

Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts, and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.

From People Analytics To Tech

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello, listeners. This is your host today, Bill Bannham. And in this episode, uh I'm delighted to welcome back uh for maybe the third, perhaps fourth time, uh Matthew Hamilton, Vice President of People Analytics and HRIS over at Protective Life. Matthew is a West Point and MIT graduate. Matthew has joined me on the HR chat podcast before to help demystify people analytics and make data-driven HR more approachable. And he's very good at it. But this time we're going to focus on another area of responsibility, which is HR technology. Listen as we talk about setting a guiding HR tech strategy, the resources that leaders can use to get educated before going to market, and how to run an RFP process that actually drives value and how to build the business case and manage stakeholders so the project doesn't stall halfway through. So if you're an HR leader, HRIS owner, people analytics pro or someone trying to make sense of the HR Tech landscape right now, this one is for you. Matthew, my friend, how are you doing? Lovely to have you back on the show after after a little while.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Yeah, it's great to talk to you again. Good to see you.

SPEAKER_02 1:41

Let's start by talking a little bit about a shift that that you and your team made in 2025 from analytics to HR Tech strategy. You're well known, of course, for your people analytics work, but you've said your bigger focus last year in 2025 wasn't analytics, actually. It was it was more around the HR Tech stack. So what's changed?

Consolidation Without Losing Capability

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Well, uh really nothing's changed, actually. So um I I've always had responsibility both for people analytics and HR technology. Um I'm I'm kind of blessed of our HRIS team reports up to me, and I I'm really lucky that I've got a great director of HRIS who really runs the team uh and everything that's going on, lets me take more of a strategic view. Um but as far as what's changed, really nothing's changed. We actually started several years ago building out our strategy for HR technology. Um 2025 just kind of became, it was sort of the natural culmination point of a lot of points of that strategy. Um so it wasn't really not reacting to anything in the business or the market. It was really opportunities that we had defined years ago, where it was just the natural point of progression in some of our tech stack that really allowed us to kind of refocus and take that strategy or use our strategy to take ourselves to the next step.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Now let's talk about the why behind consolidation, if that's okay. A lot of HR teams are managing multiple overlapping platforms, HCM, engagement, performance, learning, payroll, benefits, analytic layers. What are some of the biggest pains that companies can solve by consolidating their vendor platforms?

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Yeah, so uh uh a lot, really. And it really depends on each company and and what your tech stack looks like that that really drive the pains, or maybe maybe I'll try and be more positive. Not the pains you're trying to fix, but the opportunities you're trying to pursue uh to continue to grow and and improve and make things better. So, you know, so obvious ones, right? It could be that you're trying to improve uh improve cost, you know, lower your expenses. That um can be a great one. You uh another real common is trying to reduce complexity, simplify your architecture, um, could be trying to improve the user experience for your managers, your employees, um, or gain a new capability that you've never had, or uh increase your your ability to uh your abilities to de-risk um aspects of your processes, uh, or it could be multiple ones of those, right? Rarely, I think, are people trying to pursue just one of those. So it's trying to balance each of those things. Um and and to be you know fair and go back to you know a word you said uh in the question, consolidation. Um, to be fair, I'm not necessarily an advocate of consolidating everything, right? Like uh this is actually part of our strategy. When we first started outlining our tech strategy, we sort we we um uh uh measured ourselves in terms of how consolidated were we. We looked at how many different vendor platforms we had serving how many different um um capabilities or or functional areas. And so if you think about it, on one extreme, a company could be where you have literally one platform to do everything. I don't think that's fully realistic. On the other end of the spectrum, you could have a separate platform for every single function or capability or need that you're trying to serve, and that becomes uh unwieldy to try and manage, that's just got uh so many pieces to it, drives your costs up, increases your complexity. And so what's the happy medium for companies that's somewhere in the middle? And I think each company needs to figure out where they need to balance between consolidating more, reducing vendors, um, but then the trade-offs of that, right, is is you may lose some capabilities. So I think it's it's trying to it's trying to solve that equation for each of ourselves, for each of our companies, of what is the right mix. And I think it changes over time too, right? So you may go down a consolidation path and an exercise of consolidating uh solutions. And then over time you'll see that um different vendors develop capabilities in different ways, or you the business needs change. So you start disaggregating that consolidation. And then over time it grows to where you're too disaggregated and you have to start the consolidation path. So it's over time, I think it flows back and forth, but having that good central view of generally where where should our company be in terms of uh on that spectrum of consolidated versus uh disaggregated to point solutions, uh, having a clear view on that is the thing that really sets you on the right path.

SPEAKER_02 6:08

Okay, very good. Let's continue along those lines then. Um so what does a good HR tech strategy actually include? And how do you stop it from becoming a vague vision statement that doesn't necessarily influence real choices?

SPEAKER_00 6:20

So I'll actually say I think actually starting with a vision statement is actually a really good point. Um that having a good vision of where we're trying to get to, what do we look like in some period of time, three years, whatever the right time horizon is. And actually, my my background, I was even before I got into this HR technology and people analytics space, I was a military officer. And actually starting with the vision, what's the commander's intent, the vision, um, is actually a very useful thing. Um but it but you can't stop there, right? So I I think getting at your question, some companies make the mistake of they'll create some amorphous, abstract vision that they have no way of actually actioning upon and doing anything towards. And then that's that's where the vision doesn't give you any value. But I think if I actually do start with a good vision of what are we trying to be, um, and that can be framed in terms of the company, human capital, the the HR, uh you know, it kind of depends on each company, but having that clear vision of what you want to try and achieve and be is a useful starting point. From there though, what you know, what builds out that good, what are the good elements of your strategy? Um something that we did years ago when we started really uh getting more disciplined in this area is we built a set of guiding principles. Um and this was not something that um any one person did. We brought our whole HR leadership team together and we we we really worked at this and set forth 10 guiding principles that matter to us, and and what they really helped serve as is the North Star for us. And so they they kind of kind of cover several different things, but what it's been useful for is it helped us set what matters to us at a time when we weren't trying to do anything specifically, or building the strategy, but we weren't trying to make other changes at that time. So it let us in sort of a neutral environment set the principles for what matter to us, and those become sort of this North Star, this you know, guiding principle beacon of how do we think about and make decisions so that inevitably, in which we have run into since then, places where we we get into having to make a decision about something that um each of us individually could look at differently. We could we could have different perspectives, but we can go back to those guiding principles and say, well, collectively, you know, when we s when we started this, we said this matters to us. And so we can evaluate our own decision processes and guide our own decisions against those things that we value that we set up as our principles. Um it seems like doing that seems like some of the work that's um kind of touchy-feely, right? Um, but but I've really found that it's useful to go back to and say, this is how we said we're going to think about things and how we're gonna make decisions. Um next piece of thinking of strategies is just having a real good understand, you gotta be real, have a real solid understanding of what your tech stack looks like. Not just who our vendors are, not what our platforms are, but you know, what are they, what capabilities do they provide? Um what are we paying for them, right? So so uh different companies may handle it differently. We actually consolidate all of our HR tech solutions under one cost center, um, that that so I can have a good view of where the money is going to which vendors, even if I'm not a primary user of the platform, it may serve one of our COEs, uh, but but have a good centralized view of who are all our vendors, what are we paying for them, and then what are the subscription timelines. And everybody's on a subscription path now. Um so understanding when things are coming up for renewal, um, um, so that we really have a good long-range view. Um, and then what we've done is we've taken all those capabilities and we've we've literally made a map, an ecosystem map, where we literally on paper drew out where do the platforms sit next to each other and how do they overlap in terms of functionality and capability. If you're a company who's highly uh disaggregated and have a lot of point solutions, it's very likely you'll find where you're paying two or three different vendors for very similar functionality, where you have that overlap. So getting a sense of where that's happening can give you uh kind of help identify some of those opportunities where maybe over time we can collapse some of these down into one vendor. And then I'd also say your strategy, you also want to think about having a long-range view. And I kind of laugh when we're doing um not HR technology focused, but when our HR leadership team is talking about uh goal planning for the next six months, 12 months. Um I kind of chuckle sometimes because our HR tech strategy, we've mapped out a timeline that goes out till 2030, um, multi-years. And and it's gonna change, like things will change over time because stuff happens, right? But particularly when everything I mentioned before, so many uh practically all software you get now is on a subscription model. Um so when you when you're locking yourselves into a 24, 36 month, you know, multi-year subscription, you've got to be thinking forward to well, not not just what's going on now, but what happens multiple years in the future when we're coming up for renewal. Do does something become an opportunity to change a vendor in the future? Um, how do I it may drive current decisions of when I'm going out to get something, something now, having a sense of, well, when is my, you know, uh an adjacent type vendor solution, when is that coming up for renewal? That may drive what kind of a uh subscription timeline that I lock in now so that I'm not hurting myself down the road and reducing my future decision opportunities. So there's probably a lot more that goes into it, but those are some of the things that really jump to my mind in terms of what do you want to have in that strategy?

Running An Outcome Driven RFP

SPEAKER_02 11:58

Okay, very good. Thank you very much. I'd like to move on now and talk a bit about the the RFP process. Many RFPs are run like a procurement checkbox exercise. What are the biggest mistakes you see HR teams make in the RFP process? And what does an outcome-driven RFP look like in practice?

SPEAKER_00 12:16

Yeah, so I think a big mistake would be not taking ownership of the process, right? Um in a company, you uh any sizable company, you're gonna have uh, you know, some uh partners in procurement vendor management, and you totally should partner with them, right? Uh I've got some great partners uh in our vendor management team that I've worked with for years. Um have a strong relationship there, but don't let them just run the process and and be a you don't want to be on the sidelines of your own thing, right? Like this is this is something that you as the HR leadership team are trying to build out your own tech stack. So you should be very invested and and in that process. And so that, you know, what does that look like of making sure that you're really driving the RFP is you don't want to just limit yourself to what's been done before, right? So you may you may have a template for an RFP or examples of ones that um other functions in your company have done. By all means, reference those, start with those to get a sense of, well, what are the kinds of things we need to ask? Um, particularly like if you um you talk with and partner with folks in your IT organization or IT security, you know, they they do this a lot, so they'll have a real good sense. But we but you really don't want to be only beholden to that. So you want to really customize your RFP for what matters for us, what are we trying to get and achieve. And I think a big part of that is when you're when you're putting together your requirements and to publish an RFP is really balancing what what I'll call features versus capabilities. So understanding, you know, are we looking for a very specific feature or are we looking for something that provides us the capability to do something? And and I um I think you're better off if you if you trend towards the latter is focusing on capabilities. If you get too focused on features, you may over-constrain what you're looking for and make it hard for some vendors to actually uh respond to what you want. Um, some may actually opt out because they think that you're too you know, too constrained, too, too specific on some things. Um and and I think it's useful to just kind of be a little bit more open because the vendors in the marketplace have developed solutions for problems that are kind of common across everyone, right? Like HR challenges are kind of you know you know, they're not unique to any one company. Um and so so really just focusing on telling the vendors what capabilities, what are we trying to enable ourselves to do? You show us how your solution helps us do that better or do it or do it better. Um and and just kind of just anecdotally, I've seen I was talking with somebody at a conference and um you know they they just philosophically had a different approach than we did for a similar type of uh uh go-to-market, where they went out with I I want to say it was something like nine a list of 900 requirements. Uh for something similar, I think we went out with 60, right? Uh and I think it just makes it easier on yourself. Now you don't want to go out with too general, right? You don't want to just say, you know, help us do performance management. Okay, well, get a little bit more detailed on that. But I I think you can you can not over-constrain ourselves and be a little bit open to that vendor influence to show us uh you know what your solution does.

ROI And The Business Case

SPEAKER_02 15:28

Okay, so you you've uh you've done all this work getting to this point. Um you're not one of those companies that asked for 900 different functionalities to to take off for you to approve. Uh that seems you know quite high, certainly. Um so let's talk about building the business case that gets approved then. Um what what makes the strongest business case? Cost savings, reduced complexity, employee experience, better analytics, risk control. How do you frame ROI in a way that resonates with leadership?

SPEAKER_00 15:59

Yeah, so I think it depends on what matters to each organization, right? So different different organizations have different things driving them at different points in time. So whatever the priorities are in your business, leverage that, right? Like if you're in an environment where it's really about cost control and expense savings, well, focus on that. If you go, if you go build a great, a great business case that doesn't address the cost savings component, well, you're probably gonna not have a very strong case when you take it up through whatever your your channels are to get approval. Um so really it you know, going back to some of those opportunities we talked about earlier: cost savings, reducing complexity, improving experience, it really depends on what matters to your organization. So uh make that sort of the primary drive for building your case. Um, not that you can't include the other ones, right? Like you, by all means, you should address all of those areas. I think in building that business case, you want to paint the picture of how things are different. Um, and so so you know, kind of similar goes back to you got to have a real clear picture of how things are now. So if you're trying to say we should, we should go invest in this, we should go do this, you gotta be able to very clearly paint the picture of, well, how is it now? How does this new thing we want to invest in, how does this new solution enable us to be different, be better, improve on this area so you can paint that contrast. Um, when your business case is more built around we should do this be I'm kind of joking here, but right, we should do this because we should do it, or we should do this because it's cool. Um that's not an impossible business case to build, but it's a lot harder, right? Particularly because you're gonna run you're gonna run into some point, you know, it could could be could be your CHRO, could be your CFO, who's really gonna ask some hard questions. And and if you don't have a real solid case built upon objective data around whatever that is you're trying to solve, um the the you know the user experience problems, people not using the platform, the prior platforms you've invested in, um, reducing expenses. If if you're not really focused around those questions that they're gonna ask, it's gonna be a hard case to make.

2026 Playbook And Market Research

SPEAKER_02 18:00

Okay, wonderful. Uh I've only got more questions for you for today. Uh the next one, let's kind of maybe recap some of the things that you've mentioned so far. I'd love to get your take in terms of lessons learned and advice for uh HR leaders doing what you guys went through in 2025 uh this year. So looking back at some of the biggest lessons that you've learned and what would you uh what would you recommend to HR leaders perhaps planning to focus on their HR Tech stack in 2026, what what would be some of your tips for them?

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Yeah, so definitely we would we've said strategy a lot. I would definitely say start if you don't already have an HR Tech strategy, start to build one. And it's um it's it's not that you just sit down and once and do it, right? It's a living, breathing type of uh of approach. I literally, the document that our strategy exists in, I don't think I've ever retitled it from saying draft in the title. Like it's always in draft state because it's continually living and breathing. Um but if you don't have anything, it makes it harder to make decisions in the future. So starting to build out that strategy, uh, and and like I said, it's not just sit down and do it once, it's an evolution over time. Um, I think that is is a very, very useful um place to start. Um as part of that, and or maybe in in in parallel with it, is getting a real strong picture of your current state, right? It's hard it's hard to decide where we're trying to get to if we don't know where we're at. So real strong view of the current state, just of the vendors, the solutions that you have, how much expense is that adding up to, particularly if you if you're not like us, if you don't consolidate all of those uh expenses into one cost center and they're split across multiple cost centers, you may have a real hard time at first of just even understanding how much money do we pay on an annual basis for all these things. Um so understanding what you're paying, what your timelines are, like how how long you're locked into certain things for, because that may drive, well, uh, you know, if we're if we're locked in for 36 more months on this subscription, it's probably not worth too much energy looking at alternatives in this space right now. Um Although I'll caveat that, I'll kind of contradict myself here. Another real strong thing that leaders can do now is to start to orient on the market, um, even if you're not actually active in the market. Actually, the best time to orient on the market and the vendors and what's going on is when you're not trying to go find a solution to add a capability or to replace something, because then you're under time pressure, right? You have pressure to go out and so it may lead you to actually make uh some hastier decisions. If you start to get an orientation and maintain an orientation on the market, then when you get to those points where it's like, oh, we need a new solution for, you know, whatever, um, uh performance management, that's the example I gave before, then you already have a sense of who to go to, of what vendors to go look at. So you have that strong orientation. Um, you know, something else uh that I think leaders can do too is as you're both getting that orientation and then when you get to the point if you're actually going down the path of going to market is to really educate and inform yourself. Um, you know, we talked about the the building or what pieces do you have in an RFP to to make that strong. Um but I think an important part of even before you get to that is is really orienting and on the market and coming in with a strong point of view. Uh otherwise you could end up talking to a lot more vendors than you need to, um, and and just wasting time. That's one of the hardest or one of the most valuable resources, right? Is time. You know, you can't go spend hours and hours and hours of demos with dozens of vendors. You've got to real quickly take the slate of everyone out there in the market. And there's a lot of HR tech vendors, right? Um, taking that down to a much more manageable shortlist quickly so that you can spend deeper time with that shortlist. And really get a sense of who can do what we need them to do, or even if they all can do it, who can do best what we need them to do, what's the best fit for us. So getting that market orientation, engaging with the different resources out there, research and advisory firms, different uh there's different uh aggregators of reviews. Um I've actually found um we came into some some evaluations with a good point of view to begin with, but we actually also augmented that using generative AI using a researcher agent within Microsoft Copilot, gave it some some info of what we were looking for, constrained some constraints for some of the short list we were looking for. And it I was I was actually shocked at how good the research was um helping inform and and and frankly validate things that we already knew, gave uh uh gave us that you know further layer of confidence. So um so yeah, so I mean there's it's it's a it's a it's an interesting space to be in, an interesting time to be here. A lot of I think a lot of companies would find opportunities. Um I guess maybe I would just circle back to the very first thing I said, if you know, what do leaders need to do in 2026? I think the first thing is really to start with building out or or updating your HR Tech strategy. Because if you don't, if you don't have that as sort of your core central view, you're really just flying blind. You're just you're just really then at the whim of other forces, whether that's your CFO telling you you need to trim expenses, um your CHRO saying we need to add uh uh capabilities or improve the user experience. If you don't have that guiding, you know, that guiding strategy, you're you're not driving the ship at that point, you're just a passenger.

SPEAKER_02 23:45

So don't be a passenger, listeners. Uh Matthew, before we wrap up for today, how can our folks learn more about you, connect with you? Is that LinkedIn? Do you want to share your email address? Tell us more.

SPEAKER_00 23:55

Yeah, LinkedIn. If you just uh search Matthew Hamilton on LinkedIn um uh at Protective Life, uh that's probably the best. I'm not much of a social media maven other than on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

Perfect. Well, um that just leads me to say I always enjoy our conversations. You are a wealth of knowledge. I appreciate you. Thank you very much for coming back on the show.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

Yeah, it's great to talk.

SPEAKER_02 24:18

And listeners, as always, until next time, happy working.

SPEAKER_01 24:25

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette? And remember, for what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.