Don’t be taken in by the ‘wow’ factor of technology features that don’t solve your needs HR and payroll needs. Nigel Derbyshire demystifies some of the jargon.
Every company is different, so why should the solution that you use be rigid and inflexible? In the days of pre-packaged consumables, there is a temptation to always go for the easy shrink-wrapped solutions. Often these are presented as more cost effective and offer that elusive works-out-of-the-box solution. Experience shows that they do indeed offer a solution that works out of the box, the problem is, it’s their solution not yours.
Choosing a solution that is not just based on feature-lists, but also factors in intelligent technology choices, will ensure that you don’t end up with a shiny pretty box that is full of wow but that doesn’t actually solve your crushing business problems.
Open database
Payroll, and to a much greater extent HR, are all about information. All solutions have the same basic principles. Information goes in, clever stuff happens, information comes out. The complications arise in, well all, of those steps and the difficulties occur when you try and tackle the complications. Information transparency, or more specifically data transparency, is crucial and choosing a solution that exposes the information is key.
Proprietary closed inaccessible silos of data should be a thing of the past, as more and more solutions store their data in SQL-like databases. They will tell you this gives you access to the data, which remember is actually your data, which it does. When I say that it does, I mean that it does just as long as you can work out what that number actually means in field BG124AZT5 on table PZER34G!
The sales literature said you could have access to it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can actually use it. It is obscured by a lack of information about the structure. The answer is either a self-documenting database that contains information about its structure and contents, or an alternative method of access, with the latter usually involving some software development or programming of some sorts.
When choosing a solution, make sure that it’s not just stored in an industry standard database, but also that you can actually get hold of your data too.
Information transparency is important when things need to change, which is most of the time, such as when your board of directors asks for a work force ‘cost v. absence’ report in a form that your solution doesn’t quite offer. The raw information is there, just not in a form that you want. Being able to leverage that information transparency by accessing the information using Microsoft SQL Reporting services, or even just Microsoft Excel, will suddenly validate your earlier insistence for an information transparent solution.
Open information
They say that information is power, but what they don’t say is that information management is a real hassle. It’s all very well and good having all of the information in an integrated secure location that you can access easily, but it’s quite something else to expose that information to the right people at the right time.
It is clear that the path of least resistance for deploying information to the masses is the web browser. This almost universal content container can touch people at their desks, their homes, and en-route between the two.
Ensure that your solution can be appropriately consumed via a web browser. Of late, rather than being passive display devices, web browsers have now improved to such an extent to allow actual computation to be done in the browsers themselves. The old method for web deployment was to get the web server to essentially render the display at the server, and then just send the results to the browser, whereby it would display it. While this is just fine, problems of scalability soon appear as the complexity of the content, and the number of content consumers, start to increase. The new-found performance boost in web browsers, means that a lot of this complexity can be pushed out to the client. This not only frees up server resource, but also allows more responsive and innovative web based interfaces.
Open deployment architecture
Solution deployment is usually something that is imposed on an organisation by the supplier. If you want their solution then you have to deploy it their way. So, what happens if you want to have a solution where some of the solution is provided as a service, such as payslip printing, and others need to be distributed to all of your employees, and your IT budget has been slashed. Solutions that are only deliverable via the web, are fine, if you have access to the web. In-house solutions are fine, if you have the infrastructure.
An emerging trend is the option to mix and match parts of a deployment. You want to have your payroll data on site, but you just don’t have the expertise in running a payroll. You want to have your HR database hosted, so that every manager throughout your global organisation can have access to it without you footing the infrastructure costs. You also want your employee self-service to be scalable and cost effective. Finally, the finance director must be able to access everything off-line, so it also needs to run on a laptop. An extreme example, but just as information is becoming more and more distributed, so are the requirements to have the deployment equally distributed and flexible.
Emerging standards for open data exchange and cost effective integration solutions will start to help, but your next solution should not be forcing you to just do it their way. Demand more, and demand a standards-based deployment.
Secure authentication
Everyone knows how important secure passwords are. A!24Fdc*9)(7 is much more secure than ‘fred’. Well, you would think so, but the truth is that if you have super complex passwords, then users have an understandable habit of writing them down on post-it notes!
In a survey[1] of commuters passing through Liverpool Street station in London, more than 70% of people questioned would disclose their password in exchange for a chocolate bar!
2-Factor Authentication offers another level of security. As well as a password, it also requires something that the user has for ID that is coupled with the password to gain access. Traditionally, this has been a USB device or dongle, but the use of mobile phones, either through voice or SMS text message, is becoming more popular, so much so that Google has just rolled out 2-FA using phones to all of its corporate users.
As the recent Google news[2] illustrates, the use of 2-FA is moving down from a device that gives you access to any entire system, such as a PC, to something that gives you access to an application, or even a service.
Right for you
There are solutions out there that deal with all of the issues raised here. When choosing a solution, don’t be afraid of asking difficult questions, and don’t fall into the feature-list trap. It’s your data, and it’s only right that the technology choices that you make help you to manage, deploy, and secure it.
Don’t forget that information really is power.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3639679.stm
[2] http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/09/more-secure-cloud-for-millions-of.html