Large and midsize employers will spend, in the next 12 months, an average of $1.14 million on workforce management solutions and services, reports the Gantry Group, LLC.

The Massachusetts-based consulting firm found that HR/benefits executives plan to allocate 46% of their information technology budget to talent and performance management, recruitment, leadership initiatives and compensation management.

The results also reveal that employers prefer third party HR solutions to outsourced services mainly because they want to maintain control (70%) and believe that they will also achieve greater cost savings (50%).

For instance, the survey notes, companies show a preference for third-party, remotely hosted solutions with planned recruitment implementations (67%), planned performance management (49%) and planned talent management deployments (44%).

The Gantry Group surveyed HR executives and vice presidents (28%), HR directors (32%) and HR managers (24%). In addition, 67% of the respondents were at companies with more than 1,000 employees, and 34% were at companies with more than 10,000 employees.

Other key findings included:

■ The key metrics that companies use to determine the success of their HR solutions is reduced administrative burden on HR staff (45%), followed by improved HR productivity (39%) and lower operational costs (37%).

■ The majority of respondents believe that their HR solution deployments have benefited their organizations through reduced HR time expended on benefits enrollment and administration (61%) and reduced time allocated to payroll processing (49%).

■ Dissatisfaction with HR solutions arises primarily from vendors' poor response to problems (46%), poor integration with the company's infrastructure (41%), poor performance (38%) and an increase in HR process complexity (36%).