A rose by any other name - or, is it HR or IT?

While reading the news of the day yesterday morning, I happened by this post by my trusted friend Prashanth Padmanabhan. 

The debate started well before we started speaking about "CLOUD" or SaaS, discussed many times, at meetings, global user groups and conventions, in private offices and conference halls.

Credit: http://incandescentcloud.com/cloud-credits/ - isn't it a magnificent art installation?

Indeed, should HR or IT take the lead when it come to HRIS projects? 
When the Cloud started being commercialized, the common understanding was that FINALLY the function could be solely in charge, with very limited or no input required by the IT/IS group - so there would be no need for expensive long term consultants, nor specialized IT headcount. Is that true? More specifically, can we hold it true when we are talking about critical systems as HR Core?

Global cost (or value) of a human being

[This post is a continuation of my previous post "Social accountability in Human Capital Management", posted on March 18th. You may want to read them in sequence]

When considering skilled labor a resource, I came up wondering – what is the cost of a resource? Is it simply, in this case, the salary? Or is it actually the cost of the employee providing the service? In other words, can we separate the individual from the service provided?

Typing “Cost of Human Being” in a Google Search Engine generates about 259’000’000 results in under 30 seconds. Most of these results are highly controversial, and bring in ethic debate about cost versus value, genetic research, buying human beings and ultimately, slavery.

There is only some marginal (and humoristic) information about the actual COST of raising an individual in nowadays society: after all, creating a baby is one of the (few) free acts in our modern world, but raising the same is anything but free. It has been calculated that the cost of bringing up a child in the US is close to 300’000 US, not including college (college tuition alone accounts to an average of 160’000 US for an average 4 years degree, College Board, 2011-2012 [4]).