Bond Strategy to enable HR Service Delivery – Part 2

[Gaurav Bajaj]

 Bond Strategy to Enable HR Service Delivery – Part 2

In the last blog, we covered the people-centric approach to enable HR service delivery. This is the second part of the series blog which is going to cover the strategy for the foundation of HRSD and how keeping it aligned to the platform is going to best thing possible to manage and scale it across all regions in your organization.

Building the right foundation!

This phrase above holds true for all different avenues of ServiceNow and it's pretty evident that with the speed and scale, ServiceNow is coming up with offerings across various industries, your platform is going to carry more business applications, more workflows, and a huge amount of information. This implies that building the right foundation is critical for any business process.

 HRSD's implementation vision should also begin with keeping OOTB as a key guiding principle for the transformation journey to stand up the HR foundation data. Let’s explore certain areas where it applies abundantly.

      HR Foundation Data

To provide HR services to employees, we need to have a good foundation of HR data available in the platform. HR data primarily consist of an employee’s information beyond the office e.g., DOB, home address/contact details, marital status, emergency contacts, beneficiaries, etc. This is going to come from multiple sources but mostly from HCM systems.

While planning to bring this information, we need to think about the objectives first.

One of the prime objectives is to provide information to an employee right at his hand in one place and the other could be to avail of HR service that’s dependent on a specific set of HR data.

For example- if an employee wants to update existing emergency contacts information or switch to a new insurance plan, he needs to view the existing insurance or list of his emergency contacts.

There are two key considerations for setting up HR foundation data.

•  Bring only the key data that are important to support HR services and aligned with business outcomes.

ServiceNow is the strategic business platform to build the experience layer for users to allow them to access and obtain services offered by the organization. Therefore, we need to focus on HR services before we think about the HR data. This basically means that we probably should not try to replicate the HCM system and bring all the HR information for an employee into the platform but just the key information required to build the HR services.

Try to gather answers to the below questions to decide on an attribute. This will help you place the conversation around HR data on the correct path.

• Golden data source and means to keep it up to date.
• Rationale or justification for bringing it in (not because it is present in the legacy HR system)
• Alignment with HR function and service.
• Nature and classification of the data attribute.
• How this data will be used by the end user? (Reference, read-only or modify)
• Data security, Who needs to access this data?

•   Find the right bucket to store this data.

          Data mapping and identifying target tables to store information is a major exercise and can certainly make or break your system in the HR domain due to the nature of the data (being sensitive or personal). HR data model within HRSD has evolved massively over the years. Let’s take a quick look at it based on different HR domains in the below table*

HR Domain	Table Name	Objective
HR foundation	HR Profile	Holds all key personal/non-official information of an employee.
Benefits	HR Benefits – Health, Disability, Insurance, Retirement, HR Benefits plan, Benefit type	Allows to store information related to HR Benefits – manage and view beneficiaries, and benefits obtained from the organization.
Leave of Absence	Employee time off type, Employee time off, and time off Balance	Manage, view, and track employee’s time off, their remaining balance, and different LOA types.
Compensation	Compensation, compensation salary, bonus, stocks	Manage and view compensation-related information for an employee.
Org Structure	HR position, HR Job, Role Transfer	Manage Designations, Employee’s current and previous roles.
Contacts	HR contacts, relationships	Manage the relationship and emergency contact information of an employee.
Union	Union, Union Membership, Local union chapter, local union contact	Manage union-related information and employee membership in a union.
Mobility	Visa types, Employee Visa	Manage visa-related information.

*This is still not the complete list; you can try navigating to tables and searching for all the tables within the Human Resources: Core application.

What I’ve seen in different HR implementations over the years is that we tend to map an additional set of attributes on the HR profile table or create a new custom table. This not only puts a lot of performance overhead as the HR profile is referred across the platform in HRSD but also underutilizes the OOTB capabilities and potentially adds to the custom table entitlements.

A better strategy is to navigate through all the existing OOTB tables in the HR application and do a fitment analysis before performing a data mapping exercise.

That’s all for now, I will cover another focus area in the next blog which will be out soon.

Thanks all in case you have given it a read!!!