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| The Gurteen Knowledge Website |
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Article
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Human Resources and Lotus Notes |
 
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An unpublished article written in 1998 on the role that Lotus Notes can play in the transformation of the Human Resources function. Today Lotus Domino based applications can deliver similar HR applications for the corporate intranet. The Challenges and the Dilemma Human Resources faces two fundamental challenges. The first is to provide an efficient HR administrative service to the organisation. This is the routine stuff - essential - but nevertheless mundane work such as processing change requests, handling recruitment, booking training courses and pay for performance administration. This is all fine but does nothing to directly help or support the organisation's business objectives. The second is business focused - to help the organisation meet its business objectives. This means doing such things as influencing the company culture to better meet its goals; ensuring the company has the required knowledge, skills and competencies; putting appropriate rewards and incentives in place; ensuring the right organisational structure, communications systems and policies; helping to introduce new work processes and new more effective ways of working and helping the company to change and to learn in response to rapid market and technology change. The dilemma facing HR though is that it is a cost centre and consequently in most organisations is under resourced. This means that time is often only found for the essential administrative stuff. Helping the organisation meet its business objectives always comes second and in some organisations is barely done at all. The Solution Technology can free HR from the tyranny of administration to focus on strategic business issues. By deploying appropriate workflow applications built on Notes or Domino and integrated with your exiting systems such as PeopleSoft or SAP you can build a powerful service facility that allows your 'customers' - the companies staff - both managers and employees - to have instant access to the HR information and knowledge they need. It also allows them to action straightforward HR transactions be means of the technology directly themselves. Lets look at some examples: HR Applications to Disseminate Information
HR Applications to Track Information
HR Applications to Share Ideas, Expertise and Experience
HR Applications to Facilitate Workflow
Many of the above applications are trivial in Notes terms. For example storing manuals such as the Employee Handbook or HR Policy Manual or Managers Pay of Performance Manual are obvious candidates for Notes applications. The development cost is minimal - the payback in instant availability of information, ease of update and reduced calls to HR make this investment worth every penny. Employee Records and Corporate Telephone Book Lets look at the administration of employee records in more detail. HR records are frequently out of date and duplicated in many different places. But with an appropriate Notes application, employees can be charged with keeping much of this information updated themselves. Confidentiality of information can be assured as Notes security is second to none. Also a subset of the information can be made publicly available in a corporate name and address book - this would contain people's names, telephone numbers, departments etc. Even experience and skills can be included to create a "Expert Network" that employees can turn to find the knowledge and experience in the organisation that they need to effectively perform their jobs. Once such a database is set up - by putting the onus of update on the individual and by having a software agent remind people to review their data say every 3 months the load on HR is minimal. This information can also easily be synchronised with your standard HR records system such as PeopleSoft or SAP. If you are a small organisation a Notes application can even serve as your HR records system. Training Not only can full details and timings of training courses be made available through a Notes application but a workflow application could allow managers or employees themselves to book courses directly through the system. Appraisals Many organisations, including Lotus Development itself have developed Appraisal systems that fully automate the performance appraisal system. This frees up an enormous amount of administrative time usually expended by managers and HR a like. 360 degree appraisal systems can take such an enormous amount of resource to administer for example that they are often not implemented. But a Notes based system can make such systems relatively painless to deploy. The Bonus The real pay-off in deploying the technology though is that it not only lessens the burden of administration but it also supports the strategic stuff - it can enable Human Resources to help the organisation to better meet its business objectives. Two leading products come to mind: Lotus LearningSpace Lotus LearningSpace™ from Lotus Development is a intranet based collaborative learning tool. It is used for developing, deploying and delivering interactive courses over a network and for augmenting classroom training. LearningSpace course materials include a class schedule, links to readings, and assignments and quizzes. Learning is more rapid and complete when there is interaction between a student and the instructor and between students themselves. LearningSpace encourages interaction through its facilitation of discussions among each other and with the instructor. Students work in teams and can engage in both public and private discussions. PDP PDP from Knowledge Associates is a intranet-based tool for supporting learning, the attainment of key competencies and the sharing of knowledge. PDP allows the identification of people's key competencies and enables their ongoing learning and personal development. For each competence, individuals can record their current level of performance with their managers or coaches, the level they aspire to and their plans to get there. On an ongoing basis they can reflect on and enter their daily experiences, skill development and learnings that they feel contribute to an increased competence level. When a competence falls due for review a history of these learnings is thus available for discussion with their manager or coach. In an ideal implementation everyone's learnings are shared in order to maximise the benefits of the system. Making Full Use of Lotus Notes Lotus Notes is a remarkable tool whose power is not widely understood or appreciated even though there are now approaching 30 million users and organisations such as ABB have over 105,000 interconnected users world-wide. Many companies have installed Notes for its e-mail and calendaring capabilities alone and are using it for little else. This is like using a PC with only a word-processor - an incredible - almost criminal - waste of investment. Other organisations have installed Notes and are using it effectively in just one department - typically IT but are not using it at all in other departments such as Human Resources. Other organisations are using Notes extensively but have yet to discover or leverage the recently added Domino functionality that extends Notes applications to their Intranet or the World-Wide Web. At Notes release 5.0, due to be released late this year, it will be exceptionally easy to develop powerful interactive Lotus Domino web sites for little effort and little or no knowledge of arcane Internet protocols such as HTML. This is actually possible today in Notes 4.5 and 4.6 but takes just that little bit more effort on the part of the developer. If you already have a Notes infrastructure then you should be looking to better understand Notes and how to leverage your existing investment right across your organisation on to your Intranet and out on to the Web. If you do not have a Notes infrastructure, then you should be taking a good long hard look at Notes and in particular Lotus Domino to understand how the technology can help you build or enhance your corporate Intranet. It does not matter whether you are a large global organisation or a small three person organisation - the technology and services are now available at an acceptable cost. Lotus Notes Development One of the problems with traditional IT systems is that they are costly to develop or costly and or difficult to change. With Notes this is not true. Notes applications can be developed very rapidly and Notes was designed from the outset as a evolutionary development platform - simple applications can be built very quickly and inexpensively and can evolve to more functional complex ones over time. Many Notes applications take as a little as £1,500 to £5,000 to develop; quite sophisticated powerful ones about £10,000 and even complex richly functional workflow applications can cost as little as £30,000 to develop. Return on Investment on Notes applications can be impressive even though sometimes hard to measure. Many Notes applications can typically pay for themselves in less than a year. These are applications that have been developed specifically to your requirements - not ones that have been customised. If you are worried about support - don't - Lotus Development backed up by the resources of IBM have built up a huge world-wide network of business partners (over 20,000 at last count) who can help develop and maintain your infrastructure and applications. What's more Notes applications are relatively self documenting and can be enhanced and maintained to a remarkable degree by your own non-technical people - with a little training.
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