COMPONENT SPECIFICATION & SELECTION

There are TWO main methods of specifying and selecting HR application components for your HR Digital Platform. They are: 1) The FUNCTIONAL drill down approach, and 2) The DATA driven approach.

This approach follows the HR business practice and drills down from the HR function to the processes within those functions and data needed to be collected during those processes. From the information transactions, data views and reports can be identified. It is a three level specification and can then be used to select the best solutions.

Assuming the right digital platform has already been identified (Force.com. Outsystems, Mendix, Cornerstone, etc.) the best application solution can be determined by two different means:

a) The Best Fit Method: Go to the marketplace (Apps Store) and find the application that has the best fit. That is, the most pre-written components with a menu structure, screen layout and populated data validation logic, business rules and picklist values, that match requirements. CET has a database of vendor products' functional capability that can be used to electronically match requirements to capability. This method will still require some tweeking to get everything aligned to requirements and the same amount of testing as method (b).

b) The Component Assembly Method: Download an empty application framework and assemble the required components yourself using the requirements document as a solution map. The map will contain all the data you elements you specified and you can then assemble what you need and go ahead and load the business rules (copy and paste from the Code Store) and picklist values. This is probably a more exact method and will probably be cheaper.

The following illustrates some of the tools used.

CET use an online (HR-CSAS structured) tool to obtain a client's current functional, process and data requirements.

CET then match client requirements to their chosen platform providers' developer community products in the CET Apps Store database.

CET then identify the best fit solution and functional gap.

The whole process is fast, efficient, totally objective and independent of any product supplier.

After stepping through the requirements specification process down to three levels (function, process and data) a detailed map emerges that can be used to construct a solution.

Most platform providers with an application development environment will have an application framework available for download (install on your instance of their product).

The component assembly process is then a matter of dragging and dropping fields onto a screen layout and arranging system objects into a logical menu arrangement. See the Component Assembly page more more information.

This method takes a short-cut to get straight to the information that will be needed by HR and then looks at the data that needs to be collected and the processes (including software transactions) that need to be put in place to maintain the data.

The client specifies from report lists the information requirements.

For more infromation see the blog You Can't Do Analytics without Data

This is an outcome driven appproach and will not succeed without a certain amount of change management to create some new processes and introduce some new practices relating to sourcing data (some will be unstructured "Big Data").

There will need to be metadata set up to explain HR metric reports, including what data is included in a report, where it comes from, how often is it collected, what manipluation to the data has taken place, etc.

This is a fast-track method that can deleiver immediate benefits but there is a lot of work that needs to take place behind the scene to ensure the accuracy and integrity of data used to produce inmformation that could be used to make critical business decisions.