If you’re thinking about implementing HR cloud or are currently in the midst of doing so, it’s important to know what your current systems landscape looks like now and how that will change when you put in a new HR system right in the middle.
Furthermore, if you’re planning on having this new HR tech as the nexus of all your other business systems, documenting your systems landscape and processes will help ensure that the fluidity of communication, data, and information amongst your technology remains consistent and in order, post-implementation.
Here are a few key questions that will help you begin your documentation.
How will your systems talk to each other?
If you are implementing a brand new cloud HR system from one of the top tier vendors, it is likely you will be forced to use the format of the new system. However, if this format is not compatible with your current systems, you will need to make some changes.
Here’s an example.
Let’s say you have an employee with the ID ‘12345’, however, the new HR system requires alpha-numeric ID formats, something like ‘12345abc’. It’s highly likely that ‘12345abc’ is not an ID that will be recognised by your other business systems as they were configured to talk to ‘12345’, and thus will be unable to communicate with the new format.
Therefore, when you move to a new cloud-based system, it’s likely that you will have to adopt that system’s specific format in order to make sure all your other systems can talk to it.
In the preliminary phase of your implementation, it may sound like a very small, insignificant detail, but it is in fact quite important because if your employee data can’t talk to other systems, then how will you ever align processes and connect data?
Have you checked whether the business processes you are implementing are being duplicated in another system?
Let’s say that you’re currently tracking absence management in a time and expenses system, but you are planning on implementing an absence management function in the new HR system. But ‘wait-a-minute!’ you think, these two systems will be communicating with each other and we’ll and up tracking absence management in two systems—that won’t work!
Precisely. Therefore, you need to decide which system will hold the master copy of this particular business process, and which system you will retire this procedure from.
Essentially, when you move a process to another system (such as your new HR tech), you need to be sure you successfully turn off that process in the other system where it is currently being done. This is a big decision that needs to be made upfront, before the start of the
implementation.
Is your data dictionary in order?
When moving to HR cloud, you need to have a keen awareness of what kind of data you hold about your staff today, whether or not you want it in the future, and if you want to continue collecting it.
Of the data that you do decide to keep, you need to decide which system will hold that data—the new one, or an existing one? Knowing what you want to do with your data will help you properly prepare for your new system that will hopefully serve you well for many years.
For more information about data migration or implementing Cloud HR technology, please get touch.
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