e-HR

Using Intranets to Improve the Effectiveness of Your People

Bryan Hopkins, James Markham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138709300
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351772891
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Title first published in 2003. Despite all the hype about e-learning, the real breakthrough in technology, at least as far as HR goes, is in the development of the corporate intranet for people management purposes. Bryan Hopkins and James Markham's book explains the potential for intranets in every aspect of HR: personnel administration, performance management, employee development, communication and knowledge management, as well as training and e-learning. It asks and answers the key questions you need to ask yourself and provides case studies illustrating how organizations have successfully exploited their intranet to help their people work more effectively and efficiently. HR managers are under pressure to cut costs, increase the effectiveness and range of the services they deliver. In many organizations there is also considerable pressure to maximise the returns on investment in technology. This book provides you with the means to achieve all of these goals.

chapter 1
Why put the 'e' in e-HR?

HR departments have been using computers for many years now. The ability to store, sort and retrieve large amounts of information has proved invaluable, and a large, specialised software industry has grown to meet these needs. But essentially all that has happened is that computers have replaced filing cabinets, the way in which HR works has not changed greatly. This book is not about computerised filing cabinets, but is about the brave new world of e-HR, a new approach to using technology for managing people, a technology that has its roots in the Internet revolution.

Hands up anyone who had heard of the Internet in 1990. Not many hands going up there, we would imagine. And even though you may have heard of it then, it is unlikely that you would have had a connection to it. But just a dozen years later the Internet and its kin, the intranet and extranet, seem to be occupying ever more areas of our personal and professional lives.

This technological revolution has brought a new prefix into the English language - 'e-'. We can hardly move without bumping into some manifestation of the e-revolution, whether it be e-mail waiting at our desks, e-zines to read or e-shops in which to spend our money.

The 'e-' stands, of course, for 'electronic', but we have had electronic devices with us for years, so why has the word suddenly taken on a new significance? It has happened because a number of technological innovations have been combined to offer a way of bringing together many hitherto separate aspects of the world around us. The written word, speech, music, television, video and even the humble refrigerator now have a common medium where they can be brought together and managed. The libraries of the world are available at our desktops and we can use our mobile phones to check the contents of our refrigerator at home (theoretically at least!).

Figure 1.1
Talking to our refrigerators

Just how much the e-revolution will change our lives will only become apparent as the years unfold, but we are already seeing huge changes in our working lives. This book aims to look at one aspect of this: how e-technologies are changing both

• the role of Human Resource (from now on referred to as HR) Departments and the people working in them, and
• how other people in the organisation will find alternative ways of working.

The technology bringing all these different possibilities together is, of course, the browser. Whether people are using Internet Explorer or Netscape and whether these are running on a PC, Apple Mac or UNIX system, what users can see and do is essentially the same. Standard office applications are increasingly being designed for use through a browser interface and so it makes a great deal of sense for HR applications to do the same. In this way, incompatibility between different systems becomes a thing of the past and people in different parts of an organisation - even if they are working in different parts of the world can all easily access essential information using standard Internet technology.

You can find more information about the technical aspects of intranets and web technology in Chapter 2.

This chapter looks at a number of different aspects of e-HR:

• What e-HR is
• What its benefits are
• What challenges it will present
• How to get the best out of e-HR

What is e-HR?

Let us set e-HR in context by looking at how HR systems have evolved over the years.

Figure 1.2
The development of HR information systems

In the beginning was the filing cabinet sitting in the corner of the Personnel Office. Drawers full of hanging files arranged in alphabetical order, the dust they collected only being disturbed by the Personnel Manager or an Administrative Assistant when an employee did something like change an address. Systems were very much about record-keeping, with such things as static information about employees, their addresses and other personal information. As organisations grew in complexity, other information about employees came to be recorded as well, such as training records and payroll information. However, these would usually have been kept by the appropriate functional department: the Training Manager would keep the training records and the Payroll Department the payroll information, and, as Rudyard Kipling might have observed, '... never the twain shall meet'.

Computer technology of the 1970s and 1980s moved things on, particularly the introduction of desktop PCs and networking in the 1980s. Databases specifically designed to meet the needs of Personnel came on to the market and many organisations started to transfer their paper records on to computer. Thus was born what are now known as Human Resource Information (or Management) Systems, HRISs (or HRMSs).

These systems were (and often still are) based on a technology known as client-server. This describes the relationship between the computer through which the data is accessed (the client) and the data on which the computer is stored (the server). Each different system had its own database structure and particular function which meant that the data could only be accessed by specially designed software which had to be installed on a client computer, as illustrated in Figure 1.3. Of course, each client installation required a licence, so to minimise costs organisations would only install the client software on the minimum number of machines necessary. Also, because each proprietary HRIS works in a different way, people using the system would have to receive special training. Both factors combined to restrict access to HR information. The client-server relationship meant that people might have several different clients installed on their computer, each talking to a particular database and each one completely unaware of the other databases.

Figure 1.3
The client-server model

The proprietary nature of HRISs and other business systems also usually meant that systems would not communicate with each other. This increasingly became recognised as a problem and so software designed to meet all the needs of organisations in one package, referred to as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (for example, SAP and PeopleSoft), started to appear on the market. However, although these were much more powerful packages, they remained proprietary systems and it was difficult for external systems to connect to them.

So computerisation, although it seemed like a revolution at the time, did not really change things greatly. There were now no hanging files to collect dust, but the records still did not do much. The Personnel Department remained a reactive part of the business, doing what was asked of it and contributing little to company profitability. When it did rouse itself from its slumbers it was to apply some new regulation or piece of legislation - hardly activities guaranteed to win friends and influence people.

This was largely because of two factors:

• this was how it had always been done, and
• the information stored was difficult to access and analyse

The e-HR revolution has the potential to change all this. So let us first try to answer the question posed as the title of this section - what is e-HR?

What is e-HR?

Put simply, e-HR is the strategic application of web-based technologies to HR-related systems, that along with other organisational changes will lead to more broadly-based access to HR information and wider opportunities for managing that information.

At this point we should just briefly mention another term that you may come across, B2E, which means 'business to employee' This term has evolved as a counterpart to the possibly more familiar B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to customer), which are used to describe different e-commerce relationships. In this book we shall use e-HR rather than the B2E alternative, although they essentially mean the same thing.

Why is e-HR important?

E-HR technologies have the potential to revolutionise processes carried out within businesses. Why? Take a look at Figure 1.4.

Figure 1.4
Providing information with wide access

Let us consider information in two dimensions - scope and access. Existing client-server systems are focused on particular parts of the business; for example, HR information tends to be people-focused whereas Payroll Department systems are payroll-focused. Client-server architectures limit access to people with the necessary client so we would place client-server HRISs in the bottom left-hand corner. This is in contrast to the browser-based Internet model, where a standard and widely available front end provides access to information: this is the portal approach, where the term 'portal' describes its function as a gateway to information.

Two dimensions means two ways to go, so we can develop systems that:

• integrate database access (the ERP route) and so widen the scope, or
• increase people's access to the database (the portal approach).

Or we can do both, and trip happily into the promised land of enterprise-wide access to all corporate information. So what would be the possibilities were we to reach this information nirvana?

• People across the organisation could directly access whatever information was relevant to their responsibility and seniority, giving managers the information they need and improving employees' work experience.
• The linking together of different sources of information and systems would enable totally new things to happen that people have never thought of before. It becomes very much easier to cross-reference information from different sources, making it possible to look for trends and relationships that would previously have been very difficult to identify, as illustrated in Figure 1.5. We can describe this as an emergent property - a property that only appears when different elements are combined.

For example, single-celled organisms such as amoeba swim around happily, if somewhat aimlessly, on their own but, when combined, form sophisticated plants and animals with abilities that only exist because of the combination.

Web-enabled systems can do this, but how is this going to happen?

The answer is in either of two ways. ERP providers have integrated database applications and can now offer self-service, while the portal companies are now focusing on providing comprehensive front-end functionality that integrates across a wide number of different databases.

Figure 1.5
Connecting information systems across ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Why put the 'e' in e-HR?
• Chapter 2: How does intranet technology work?
• Chapter 3: What kind of e-HR is right for your business?
• Chapter 4: Delivering core HR services
• Chapter 5: Managing people more effectively
• Chapter 6: Improving collaboration and learning
• Chapter 7: Enhancing employees' benefits
• Chapter 8: Planning your e-HR implementation strategy
• Chapter 9: Implementing IT systems
• Implementation checklist
• Glossary
• Index