Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Systems Considerations in the Design of an HRIS
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Introduction
Successful implementation is central goal
Meeting the needs of the human resource management
Understand users/customers
Tech possibilities and parameters
Implementation process
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 1: Understand the different types of users or customers of the implemented HRIS and their different data needs.
Central goal of every Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) project:
Successful implementation is the central goal.
It begins with a comprehensive design for the system.
Meeting the needs of the human resource management (HRM): The probability that the completed software installation will adequately meet the needs of the HRM function and the organization can be increased by understanding the users/customers of the HRIS, the technical possibilities, the software solution parameters, and the systems implementation process.
Implementation team: It consists of members who have worked on the implementation process.
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HRIS Customers/Users: Data Importance (1 of 5)
Two groups will use the Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS):
Employee category individuals
Nonemployee category individuals
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 1: Understand the different types of users or customers of the implemented HRIS and their different data needs.
Individuals who will use the HRIS:
They can be split into two groups:
Employees.
Nonemployees.
Employee category individuals:
Managers who rely on the HRIS and the data analyzed to make decisions;
Analysts or power users who use the HRIS to evaluate potential decision choices and opportunities;
Technical staff who are responsible for providing a system that is usable and up to date for each user, or clerical employees who largely engage in data entry; and
Employees who use the HRIS on a self-service basis to obtain personal information.
Nonemployee category individuals:
Potential employees, who might log in via a Web portal to search for and apply for a position.
Suppliers and partners who are organizations that interface with the HR function for a variety of purposes.
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HRIS Customers/Users: Data Importance (2 of 5)
Employees
Managers: access to accurate data
Analysts: power users
Technicians: HRIS experts
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 1: Understand the different types of users or customers of the implemented HRIS and their different data needs.
Managers:
Have a variety of titles: manager, director, vice president, and even CEO.
Primary HRIS need: Having real-time access to accurate data that facilitate decision-making with regard to their people.
HRIS provides the manager with data for performance management, recruiting and retention, team management, project management, and employee development.
It helps the functional manager make decisions that will contribute to the achievement of the unit’s strategic goals and objectives.
It enables the manager to view and engage in employee life cycle changes such as salary decisions, job requisitions, hiring, disciplinary action, promotions, and training program enrolment.
Analysts (Power Users):
Most demanding user of the HRIS.
Primary role: To acquire as much relevant data as possible, examine it, and provide reasonable alternatives with appropriate supporting information to facilitate the decision process of the manager.
Referred to as a power user because they access more areas of the HRIS than almost any other user.
Must be proficient with reporting and query tools.
Must understand the process used to collect the data, how new data are verified, and how the HRIS and the employee life cycle interact.
Technicians (HRIS Experts):
Role: To ensure that appropriate HR staff members have all the access, information, and tools needed.
They understand what is needed from an HR-process standpoint and then translate that into technical language, so the technical employees know exactly what to do.
When the technical staff is planning to install the latest update and one of the results will be a change in functionality, the HRIS expert must take what the technical staff provides and translate that into language HR users understand.
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HRIS Customers/Users: Data Importance (3 of 5)
Employees
Clerical employees: understand process
Organizational employees: personal info
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 1: Understand the different types of users or customers of the implemented HRIS and their different data needs.
Clerical employees:
Spend a significant portion of their day interacting with the HRIS.
Must understand the process required to enter information into the HRIS.
Bear considerable responsibility for seeing that the new employee gets paid properly.
Organizational employees:
All the other employees of the organization who interact with the HRIS.
Utilize the HRIS to help manage their personal information.
May interface with the HRIS through a self-service Web portal or secure employee kiosk.
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HRIS Customers/Users: Data Importance (4 of 5)
Nonemployees
Job seekers: online recruiting
Sourcing partner organizations: Indeed, LinkedIn, Monster.com
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 1: Understand the different types of users or customers of the implemented HRIS and their different data needs.
Job seekers:
Online recruiting attracts individuals who are well educated, Internet savvy, and searching for higher-level positions.
A successful recruitment website needs to be user-friendly and easy to navigate.
The Web form that is used to collect applicant data must also be reliably entered into the appropriate fields within the company’s HRIS database.
Sourcing partner organizations:
Examples: Monster.com, Adecco.
They require information about vacant positions, including a position description, job specifications, desired candidate competencies, potential salary range, and contact information.
Business partners require information that is related to current employees.
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HRIS Customers/Users: Data Importance (5 of 5)
Important Data
Common perception in all users
Categories of data:
Information about people
Information about organization
Interaction of both
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 1: Understand the different types of users or customers of the implemented HRIS and their different data needs.
Common perception in all users: All the information is about potential and current employees with a focus on managing the organization’s human capital to improve decision making and help to achieve strategic organizational goals.
Categories of data:
Information about people.
Information about the organization.
Data created as interaction of the first two categories.
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HRIS Architecture (1 of 10)
The Early Days
Mainframe computers
A single-tier computing system
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 2: Discuss the differences between the five general hardware architectures that are presented, from “dinosaur” to “cloud computing” to “bring your own device.”
Mainframe computers:
Built by International Business Machines (IBM).
These systems hosted the payroll applications for most enterprises.
A single-tier computing system:
Mainframe computers had the architecture of a single-tier computing system.
Everything resided on the mainframe and had to be accessed by the client company locally.
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HRIS Architecture (2 of 10)
Client-Server (Two-Tier) Architecture
Used the power of PCs
Purpose: spread out processing capability
Created by HRIS vendors
Database management system
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 2: Discuss the differences between the five general hardware architectures that are presented, from “dinosaur” to “cloud computing” to “bring your own device.”
The personal computer (PC): It allows re-allocation of many typical HR functions to the local processing power.
Purpose of the two-tier architecture: To spread out low-powered processing capability to the dozens of PCs.
Client-server (two-tier) architecture:
Created by HRIS vendors such as PeopleSoft.
Used the power of PCs.
Database management system:
Used for HR applications.
This model standardizes how data is physically stored on the computer and provides standard data access via the Structured Query Language (SQL).
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HRIS Architecture (3 of 10)
Client-Server (Two-Tier) Architecture
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 2: Discuss the differences between the five general hardware architectures that are presented, from “dinosaur” to “cloud computing” to “bring your own device.”
Figure 2.1: Two-Tier (Client-Server) Architecture.
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HRIS Architecture (4 of 10)
Three-Tier and N-Tier Architecture
Three-tier architecture: servers divided
Drawbacks: network traffic and installation
Adoption of the Web browser
N-tier architecture: expandable to handle load balancing
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 2: Discuss the differences between the five general hardware architectures that are presented, from “dinosaur” to “cloud computing” to “bring your own device.”
Three-tier architecture:
The “back end” servers are divided into two components:
The database server and
The application server.
Drawbacks of two- and three-tier systems:
A large amount of network traffic or “bandwidth” is required.
The user interface client needs to be installed on every PC that needs to access the HRIS.
Adoption of the Web browser:
Adopted to solve the issues of the two and three-tier systems.
The browser created a “thin client” environment.
An Internet Web browser comes installed on all major operating systems (OS) such as Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android.
A browser works well in a low-bandwidth network environment.
A standard Web server (Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS), Apache’s Web Server) manages HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) communication between the browser and the application server.
Reasons for the label of N-tier architecture:
It is expandable to multiple Web servers and application servers to handle load balancing.
Web servers can be geographically dispersed to provide worldwide access.
Additional file servers can be added to save documents, reports, error logs, and employee data, which are generated on a daily basis.
Multiple print servers or specialized printers can be added as needed.
Additional “process schedulers” can be added to handle large batch jobs such as payroll cycles.
Not going to focus on the technical elements of a computer system now. We’re more focused on application.
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HRIS Architecture (5 of 10)
Three-Tier and N-Tier Architecture
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 2: Discuss the differences between the five general hardware architectures that are presented, from “dinosaur” to “cloud computing” to “bring your own device.”
Figure 2.2: Three-Tier Architecture.
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HRIS Architecture (6 of 10)
Three-Tier and N-Tier Architecture
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 2: Discuss the differences between the five general hardware architectures that are presented, from “dinosaur” to “cloud computing” to “bring your own device.”
Figure 2.3: N-Tier Architecture.
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HRIS Architecture (9 of 10)
Mobile Access
Devices with greater speed and memory
Mobile operating systems
Bring your own device
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 2: Discuss the differences between the five general hardware architectures that are presented, from “dinosaur” to “cloud computing” to “bring your own device.”
Devices with greater speed and memory: Many people use mobile devices that have greater processing speed, power, and memory than even the most powerful computers.
Mobile operating systems: Systems such as Android and iOS provide an easy to use interface that non-technical people can navigate.
Bring Your Own Device:
Enterprises encourage “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) policies.
Employees can access the HRIS through apps installed on their phones.
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HRIS Architecture (10 of 10)
Security Challenges
Top priority for HRIS
Situations to be handled by security
Two auditing standards:
SSAE 16
ISO 27001
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 3: Discuss, very generally, the main concepts of hardware and database security.
Top priority for HRIS:
Security ranks as a top priority for any human resource information system.
When choosing a cloud solution, the evaluation process must include a thorough security analysis.
Situations to be handles by security:
Exposure of sensitive payroll and benefits data between employees.
Loss of sensitive personnel data outside the enterprise.
Unauthorized updates of key data such as salary amounts, stock options.
Sharing of personnel or applicant review comments with unauthorized employees.
Sharing data with external organizations and service providers.
Two auditing standards that cloud service providers should comply with:
Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements #16 (SSAE 16) and ISO 27001.
SSAE 16 asserts that a provider meets security process requirements and has been audited.
ISO 27001 requires that a provider implements a management and control framework related to security risks.
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Best of Breed (1 of 6)
Best of Breed: architecture that combines products
Goal: deliver best possible solution
Three conditions for the synergy to work:
Perceived need
Inoperability guidelines
Compatible applications
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 4: Discuss the “best of breed” approach to HRIS acquisition and the various options available for each functional area of HR.
Best of Breed (BoB): It is an architecture that combines products from multiple vendors.
Goal of BoB: To deliver the best-possible point solution to meet the business need.
Three conditions for the synergy to work:
There should be a perceived need for a specialized solution.
A universally agreed-on set of guidelines for interoperability must exist between applications.
This exists at both the syntactical and the semantic levels.
Applications need to “speak the same language.”
At the semantic level, the language needs to map between software applications.
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Best of Breed (3 of 6)
Talent Management
Recruiting has many BoB opportunities
Software to fine-tune hiring process
Optical character recognition scanning applications not provided in an HRIS
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 4: Discuss the “best of breed” approach to HRIS acquisition and the various options available for each functional area of HR.
Many BoB opportunities: The business process to recruit new employees for a company has many BoB opportunities.
Focus of HRIS applications:
The applications tend to focus on the internal hiring processes of the company such as:
Creating and approving job requisitions,
Saving applicant data,
Scheduling interviews,
Capturing interview results, and
Finally hiring the employee.
Fine-tuning of the process:
Optical character recognition scanning applications can eliminate the rekeying of applicant data from paper-based resumes.
Other applications can perform applicant database searches, post job requisitions directly to Internet job sites, and run applicant background checks.
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Best of Breed (4 of 6)
Time Collection
Time-keeping systems:
Capture hourly data throughout a site
Can help with employee scheduling
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 4: Discuss the “best of breed” approach to HRIS acquisition and the various options available for each functional area of HR.
Time-keeping systems:
Most HRIS vendors do not provide the hardware needed to track time.
Time-keeping systems will capture the hourly data from various readers throughout a site.
Employee scheduling for various shift coverages can be implemented with time collection or planning software.
Example: bus operators:
Transit districts schedule bus operators to cover a very complex route system throughout the week.
Actual hours worked, reported sick time, and vacation time are collected for each pay period.
Such data will be reviewed each pay period prior to being transmitted to the HRIS payroll application.
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Best of Breed (5 of 6)
Payroll
Can be outsourced to other vendors
Looking for provider at the lowest cost
Large corporations would purchase this application
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 4: Discuss the “best of breed” approach to HRIS acquisition and the various options available for each functional area of HR.
Outsourced to other vendors:
The entire payroll process may be outsourced to another vendor, such as ADP or Paychex.
Employee time data, pay rate, and benefit information would be transmitted to the external vendor for processing.
It is conceptually the reverse of the typical BoB motivation.
Provider at the lowest cost: The enterprise is not looking for the best technical or functional solution but for a provider offering a commodity service at the lowest cost.
In the case of a large multinational corporation with lots of employee levels, it would probably be prudent to purchase the HRIS payroll application.
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Best of Breed (6 of 6)
Employee Benefits
Health care providers: support interfaces
Cost-benefit analysis should be performed
BoB alternative: more powerful than standalone HRIS
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 4: Discuss the “best of breed” approach to HRIS acquisition and the various options available for each functional area of HR.
Health care providers:
Employees choose health care providers such as Kaiser or Blue Cross for their medical insurance.
These providers support interfaces with the major HRIS applications so that, as employees log into the enrollment software, they can review offerings tailored to their company’s plan.
When employees select a particular insurance program, they can then transmit enrollment data to the provider through their organization’s HRIS.
A cost-benefit analysis:
BoB solutions introduce additional complexity into the software architecture which can add expense.
A cost–benefit analysis should be performed by the HR function to determine whether the BoB alternative is to be used.
BoB alternative:
More powerful solution than a stand-alone HRIS.
The BoB alternative creates system flexibility, as each application can be managed and upgraded independently.
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Planning for System Implementation (1 of 2)
Rampton, Turnbull, Doran: 13 steps
Jessup and Valacich: 5 steps
Regan and O-Conner: 8 steps
Points to remember regarding system implementation.
First key step: planning.
Johnson, Kavanagh, Carlson, Human Resource Information Systems, 5e © SAGE Publications, 2021.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 5: Develop an understanding of the general steps and factors that affect system implementation.
Views of different authors and consultants:
Rampton, Turnbull, and Doran discuss 13 steps in the implementation process.
Jessup and Valacich divide the implementation of a system into five steps.
Regan and O’Conner provide eight steps for implementing information systems.
Points to remember regarding system implementation:
This is a process that will take a team of individuals anywhere from six weeks to three years to complete;
A variety of ways to manage this process may be attempted, so long as the key issues are examined and organizational goals for the implementation are achieved;
There is no single definitive approach to be used in all situations.
First key step: planning:
Absolutely critical step in any business process and especially in the design of any large-scale software implementation involving multiple-process interfaces.
Increases the probability that the implementation will be successful.
Provides a framework within which the implementation team can proceed, and it provides some decision-making parameters for any unforeseen difficulties that might appear.
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Planning for System Implementation (2 of 2)
Topics regarding planning process.
Choice between configuration and customization.
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Satisfies Learning Outcome 5: Develop an understanding of the general steps and factors that affect system implementation.
Topics regarding planning process:
Project manager;
Steering committee/project charter;
Implementation team;
Project scope;
Management sponsorship;
Process mapping;
Software implementation;
Customization;
Change management;
“Go live”;
Project evaluation; and
Potential pitfalls.
Choice between configuration and customization:
It is a key architectural decision during implementation.
A fit-gap analysis is done and the result is an understanding as to where organizational processes and the software processes mesh (fit) and where they do not (gap).
Any gaps that are identified need to be closed either through :
Modifying organizational processes,
Configuring the HRIS application to perform in a certain manner or
Customizing the software.
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