Extrapolating from Rob Scott's blog - Why HR Applications still continue with Employee Self-Service?

Why a product like LinkedIn would be a much better HR application for certain areas of HR or HR Service Delivery?

Continuing off from my earlier blog on whether we are duplicating On-Premise HCM onto the Cloud.

Why do I believe we have not seen anything fundamentally different yet?

a)      I would have been happier if the entire concept of Employee Self Service had been made obsolete.

b)      I am not convinced that we should be having Recruiting application as part of HCM Application landscape of an Enterprise in the “Age of Machines”.

In this post, we will focus on employee self-service.

First up, let me say this is a continuation / extrapolation of a blog by Rob Scott. You will see why in the later part of this post.

Let’s take a step back and assess the context.

An understanding and appreciation of the trends espoused in various blogs, articles and research reports like “The Deal in 2020” by the Work Foundation ( http://www.theworkfoundation.com/DownloadPublication/Report/255_255_deal202_050710.pdf ), Peter Sheahan in his speech during SuccessConnect 2014 also quotes examples of how organizations effectively use crowdsourcing to provide solutions which they cannot resolve by themselves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhYtAoYxRwI. All these point to a reality where organizations will deal with and/or engage a floating workforce who may not be part of the organization on a regular basis.

Some of the content in “the Deal in 2020” present a realistic picture. An example of this would be the lack of faith on the leadership. People becoming increasingly cynical. This has manifested in the recent past in geopolitical space, be it the so called “Arab Spring” or more recently in HongKong. Let’s not fool ourselves that what happens in political / public space is not related to organizations. It is the same human beings who work in organizations. And Business & Politics have been accepted as two faces of the same coin. Politics is run as a business and in business you have high political activity. No surprises there anymore. We have come to accept that.

On the question of Employee Self Service, me & my colleague Immanuel Kingsley were discussing whether Employee Self Service is really needed from a HR context.

Our method was on what is generally provided as Self Service:

a)      Updating personal data – addresses, contact details, family details;

b)      Benefits nominations

c)       Any education or training completions

d)      Viewing payslips

e)      Probably updating time sheets and applying for Leave of Absence.

We felt that when we start breaking down the services in this ESS, we will find most of these to do with updating personal information of the employee. Basically a tool to allow employees to own parts of their own data and keep it updated. The responsibility of this data is theirs. But the real issue is the data is in the databases of an organization and is repeated across as many organizations as the employee joins and quits.

If the spouse also works, it is all the more replication for the same family data across the enterprises they work! Ofcourse, their individual non-family data is different.

At the same time, there are many other transactions that are enabled for an employee but they fall into the category of Employee Portal than Self-Service per se.

The focus of the discussion Immanuel & I had was why none of the Cloud HR Application providers have tried to disrupt this model of Employee Self-Service and what happens when a large percentage of the workforce is contingent workforce. If people keep floating In & Out, or if some of the projects or jobs are carried out by people who are not even part of the organization, how does the organization track their personal data?

We decided to do some research on this and voila, I came up on the blogs of Rob Scott. I would strongly recommend anyone interested in HR Technology to go through his blogs. I am a fan, obviously!

I was pleasantly surprised that Rob had already written about this in his blog on Personal Data Stores . Similar thoughts and motivations for this line of thought across time & space!

This only confirmed our belief that probably a product like LinkedIn is an example of an HR Application of the future. Most of us have our professional details in LinkedIn. What does it take for LinkedIn or a similar product to actually allow us to store personal data as well? The architecture may look something like this:

This may not be the perfect architecture and not the model. But this is an attempt at conceptualizing how it may look like. Ofcourse, there are issues on how to link to an employee id, integration pitfalls, what should be the API, etc. I guess we are only at a starting point.

The benefits of this type of a Personal Data Store are highlighted by Rob in his blog http://robscottinsyd.com/2014/01/10/dear-hr-vendors-are-you-thinking-about-personal-data-stores/

Most of us use smart phones where we categorise our contacts as Family, Friends, Co-workers etc. A similar concept can work wonders in the access grouping of Personal Data Store. 

And in the context of a floating population, this kind of an approach to employee data (applicable to both floating and continuous) might make sense for enterprises. It frees up the Enterprise from the need for granting and removing (whether manual or automated) access to Self-Service, delivery of Self-Service through handheld devices (mobile, tabs etc), authentications, implementations, user training etc.

Ownership of the data is with the employee, contractor or otherwise, and platform is any product such as LinkedIn. And the data is pulled On-Demand using a service. The HR systems of the enterprises may need to undergo some change to accommodate such a concept, as well. Similarly, when the employee wants to pull some data from the organization related to him/her, like a training completion, certification, appreciation etc, that can be allowed to be ported to the Personal Data Store (for the part related to that particular employee) by the Organization.

While there will be pros and cons of this approach of Personal Data Platform, the surprise for us is why is this not thought about by any of the HR Application providers. This would have been really disruptive. 

And it is in this context, I feel a product like LinkedIn may probably be a HR application of the future. Most of the current HR Application vendors provide a functionality to bring in our profile from LinkedIn already. So the capability to pull data from a Professional Data Store (LinkedIn in its current avatar) already exists.

I am sure many in HR and HR Technology would have a lot of inputs and thoughts on this subject. Would love to hear from the community.

The second part on why I feel Recruiting should not be part of HR landscape of an Enterprise, we will see in the next post.