Disclaimer
Note : This write-up does leverage some of the solution positioning statements, graphics and diagrams from the materials of the Offerings of my employer's Solutions' portfolio, however, in context of this write-up, it need not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employer. Its primarily an attempt to provide my views on putting a solution construct together to establish a Single View of Employee.Background
After some old work since 2007, here is a new stream around MDM Solutions to share some of the guidance I continuously provide to MDM and Information Integration practitioners more broadly.Going back to the topic of this post, I still recall that around 2011 there was a lot of buzz on getting the strategy right for a centralized Employee Directory or a centralized Employee Registry or a centralized Employee Master. After that, atleast during my engagements with customers and partners this area became quite. In Q1 of 2014 I saw that some practitioners I work with upping the ante on their barrage of questions in this area and the most obvious reason for the same would be opportunities and customer queries. ( which obviously is music to my ears ). So this attempt is to share some details on how to go about putting together an approaching for building a Single View of Employee ( SVE ) solution at a very basic level from the many presentations I have made. The write-up is more directed towards Functional experts and Solution Architects. Its sometimes said the brunt is in the basics so lets dive in ...
Lets dive in ....
After some preliminary studies on pain points, I began to realize that some ERP Vendors and niche HR Solution providers were making their best attempts to gain a foot-hold in this solution area end to end but in vain.Talking about MDM Programs and having reviewed various trendings reports and views of other MDM Market research experts I can safely infer MDM programs supporting Customer, Account and Product domains; the Employee domain & Asset Domain coming in 4th in the list of considerations.
Lets understand some learnings I have for the vectors from where a business case builds up for the Single View of Employee -
- ERP systems have challenges in providing Single View of Employee Record as it does not normally provided an integrated view across all the sources
- The attribution of Master Information of Employee is spread across payroll, financial planning, learning management, travel support, records management systems, social profiles, analytical systems and many others and there is a need for a single system to bring it all together
- Provide an Employee's record with all the activities in one single view
- Identity Management Systems need to integrate with a system providing Employee records for provisioning functions with a key focus on certain changes in the Employee record which have to know real time for actions
- Data Governance Strategies coverage typically has gaps around the use cases for Stewardship on Employee data and Employee Hierarchy/Location Hierarchy relationships
- There have been instances where the HR team does not share business process functions with IT and vice versa
- Even though HR makes Employee related policies and manages legal matters, they do not have a centralized "executable" Policy Hub which can be leveraged by systems
- Data around Part time hires or contractual hires receives less operational management and tracking in comparison to regular employees
- Detecting Threats and Fraudsters upfront
- Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud ( the SMAC effect )
Defining the Single View of Employee Solution
Lets see if we can provide a preliminary definition to the solution Single View of Employee to cover most of the objectives the program might entail. It may sound surreal but as it turns out, it pretty much similar to a "Single View of Party" solution or a "Single View of Customer" solution albeit with some differences on the models. Note that I am not using any Industry specific slant to keep things a bit generic."Single View of Employee is an Employee data integration and governance solution that maintains an authoritative source of employee data, enables the 360 degree View of an Employee and manages the access and distribution of the data in a standardized way that can meet corporate, legislative and privacy requirements. It combines the capabilities of information integration, master data management, governance and analytics to support the delivery of trusted information to all consumers"
As you form opinions about the definition, it may be good to review some additional considerations from other sources -
- Employee information retention to meet the requirements of corporate policies and industry regulations
- HR is tasked with providing or publishing an increasing amount of corporate information such as policies, procedures, business conduct guidelines, benefits information, links to external services or benefits providers, forms, career planning, financial planning and retirement planning.
- This information must be consistently accurate, in concert with industry, regulatory and governmental guidelines, and frequently tailored to regional, cultural and language differences.
- The information that HR publishes must be retained as corporate records in the event that any such information is requested during future litigation.
- The efficient employee lifecycle management can serve as a foundation to manage the creation, review, approval, publishing and retention of corporate information, thereby obtaining greater return on these investments
- Access Management across SaaS Providers subscribed to by the Enterprise
At first, its good to be aware that IBM offers a basic and rich solution which takes care of most aspects of the Employee Life Cycle Management via IBM ECM for Employee Lifeycle Management solution. In particular, this is solution which integrates Employee's unstructured content records and ERP systems and provides some starter business benefits.
The hire-(departure)-retire cycle
The hire-(departure)-retire cycle builds the case for the broader 360 degree Single View on Employee beyond integrations of Employee's unstructured content records and ERP systems because the governance on the attribution of Employee data is also extremely important.
The broader 360 degree view of Employee obviously has many facets to it but for now lets looks at the core functional pieces to get there.
If you look at the top of the above diagram you will see an indicative set of source systems on the left which are primal in providing the data for building the single view of the Employee. Given that some statistics provide for an estimate of about 70% spend attributed to getting Employee source data to an MDM solution, it quite clear that Data Integration and Data Quality plays a key role.
In the depiction above, the MDM Solution should be having the responsibility of providing consistent understanding on Employee information and Relationships while providing for Master Data Governance and it should still be able to accommodate, control and manage changes in attribution and processes. It should be able to actively participate in business processes real-time and have good event publishing capabilities.
The solution should provide a consistent understanding of the Employee master data, its associated Hierarchies, Locations and Relationships alongside a set of capabilities for regular and situational master data governance. It should also provide for the consistent use of Employee master data across the organization via seamless Data distribution capabilities.
One can safely infer that like other MDM Programs, here too, Data Discovery/Analysis, MetaData Management, Lineage, Data Integration, Data Quality, MDM itself, BPM and Master Data Distribution form the core building blocks.
Turning on the magnifying glass on the MDM components, its core functions would be as depicted below -
As many of you practitioners would understand, it becomes obvious that the MDM component in the Single View of Employee solution should take care of -
(a) Acquiring Employee information from various Line of Business Systems like HR etc.
(b) Managing a system of view or a system of record for the employee data and ensure that it is governed for high level of confidence
(c) Acting on the Employee data to disseminate it to the consumers which still managing security
By embracing the IBM ECM for Employee Lifeycle Management solution while powering it with IBM's Information Integration and Governance capabilities will lead to significant benefits.
For Information Integration and Governance, IBM's InfoSphere platform plays a very significant role to make information more trustworthy and to protect it. The following capabilities of the InfoSphere platform should be in consideration.
- Metadata, business glossary and policy management
- Information integration
- Data quality
- Master data management
- Data lifecycle management
- Data privacy and security
Indicative impact on employee life-cycle management
Summary
Ultimately, the SVE Solution removes uncertainty across all sources to become an authoritative source of employee records and ensures that -
As per what is typically summarized at the end of any Single View related presentation -
The main point here is that the solution can help business users can work with Trusted and current Employee information so that HR, Billing, Payroll and other functions have optimized business process and outcomes.
Is the Employee Record understood?
The data structures in the sources have to be understood clearly and you need to have a technology to discover, profile and share metadata. There should be processes in place to share definitions and policies across projects.
Is the Employee record correct?
All the integration and transformation of data and content should be able to deliver accurate, consistent, timely and complete Employee information.
Is the Employee record holistic?
The solution should be able to provide a consistent understanding of Employee data and associated data while providing a mechanism for consistent use of Employee data across the enterprise as prescribed by governance policies and other compliance norms.
Is the Employee Record current?
Temporal Views need to supported and employee data has to be governed throughout its lifecycle reducing costs and risks while improving application performance and meeting retention compliance mandates
Is the Employee Record secure?
We should have all measure of security in place to meeting the Information Security Guidelines and associated mandates. This could entail real-time security and monitoring, fine-grained auditing, automated compliance reporting, data-level access control, vulnerability management and auto-discovery of sensitive data.
Is the Employee Record documented?
This refers to well documented attribution around the data models employed so that lineage and glossary that can be surfaced to business users ad certain points required.
The above was the concluding section of this write-up.
The future coverage of this series, subject to time needed for my coverage on research, we will cover some deeper topics like -
- How would you do applicants screening, if we are looking at the "enemy" to stopped at the gate ?
- Why is a "Rules Hub" and an "Activity Hub" important for any Single View Solution ?
- Given the broad acceptance of BYOD, how does an additional business case develop for the SVE Solution with an interesting set of considerations.
- In general what you should be aware of around the SMAC effect on SVE solutions.
Happy to take any criticism, feedback and questions.
Yours Sincerely.
