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.
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.
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.
