This is to bring to your attention some past research and developments related to the proposed staff self service system. There has been past research in the area concerned with self service system especially with the staff. Many organizations have implemented systems that have allowed their staff to get access to their informational data without necessarily going out for the administrators or human resource department assistance. This has seen many advantages in many organizations. Some of which have catapulted the organizational objectives and standards to higher levels. In the past, academic institutions as well as commercial goods and service providers have streamlined the management of their affairs by use of self service systems. The organizations who find themselves switching to staff self service systems are in most cases those which have many staff who may be geographically dispersed. An example is the United Nations organizations. They always gather data from different countries which need to be assembled and analyzed for information derivation. Giving the task to a few people to do the data entry leaning and analysis would take forever and thus prove inefficient. Such have therefore adopted enterprise resource planer systems, which in them is embedded the self service system. Data has only to be entered once and the entire departments have the same, hence can easily and effectively are utilized for the greater good of the company or the organization.
Examples of systems developed in the past
As mentioned in the introduction, many self service systems in the past have been in developed to meet the divergent needs of different users in different organizations. Though these systems are developed by different people in different organizations, their implementations are almost the same. The functionalities offered by these systems are almost the same. The only difference comes when they are deployed. Varying user needs will require different deployment standards and approach. A few differences also arise based on the users’ needs for the system, which in effect tends to vary from user to user.
An example of a self service system in the field currently is one used by the United Nations. The system is embedded in an ERP, which allows the UN staff to access data from different stations all over the world. The self service system enables staff to enter and change a variety of personal information allowing faster data processing by the relevant bodies (Umoja, 2011). It also frees up time for human resource management and clerks. Some of the functionalities that this system in use offers include the ability of staff to enter leave and overtime requests and track their approval. In this case staff members need not go all the way to the human resource department and burden the clerks with the task of filling their request. Approval can also be monitored from the comfort of their office desk and once it is done a notification is sent to the mail. A member of staff also has the ability to enroll in training courses that are offered by the organization without the need of physically walking over to the enrollment office. Personal data can also be viewed and updated as needed and urgently. If, at any one time, for example, a staff changes his or her address, immediately it happens, he or she can change the same individually and the new record shall be updated in all the system automatically. The self service system also allows UN staff to view their benefit entitlement at any time and also participate in interactive staff performance evaluation in the body. To ensure integrity of data, accessibility measures have been put in place to ensure that at no one time does the wrong person get access to somebody’s account.
Another kind of self service in the process of development currently is the Liverpool John Moore’s University staff infobase (InfoBase systems, 2011).The system allows the staff to do a number of activities. These include the following:
View staff development programs available and dates in which the programs were undertaken plus other information like personal learning history.
Update personal information as well as view them for verification.
Check individual salary records like pay-slips and allowances.
Allows one to provide updates for bank or other financial institutions details like account number.
Gives the ability to enter overtime hours worked which will later be approved by the supervisors.
Ability to apply online for a travel season or a motor bike loan as one may choose one can book leave, whether a flexi, examination leave, or just domestic leave update or close ones sickness or healthy record at any time. Manage personal office asset checklist as well as view the same receive messages and communication from other staff or the management.
Apart from the above stated abilities of the employees, the systems gives access to supervisors or line managers to approve and disapprove entered data to ensure that consistency is maintained in all the system records in all departments.
Considering the stated facts above about the presence of other systems in use by other organizations, it is however worth bringing to your attention that the same systems are hardly available for sale and therefore cannot be obtained just over the counter. It is also important to note that most of the systems in use are custom-made and if acquired could hardly meet the user requirements directly as specified in the requirement analysis. Therefore it is imperative that a custom-made system be developed in order to ensure full functionality and therefore efficiency is achieved.
System change-over
The need for change has been brought about by the problems that are currently being faced by the management in the day-to-day running of operations especially management of data records and generation of information. You will realize that previous human resource staff used to update each employee’s information by themselves. Employees were required to write on a piece of paper their information which was then entered by the said staff into the system. This caused a lot of time lag and inefficiency at large. The new system will require each and every employee to provide their personal information in real time directly into the system. The case of paper writing will be done away with. Personal data like addresses which are bound to change from time to time is an example of one of the information that will be solely for each employee to update (George, & Scott, 2009).
Kindly note that the introduction of the proposed system is meant to eliminate the problems that were previously experienced in the organization and not to complicate matters at all. Some of these problems include wrong mail delivery, delay in cheque processing and hence delay in staff payment, provision of wrong addresses which in most case change immediately they were printed down.
Staff, therefore, are kindly urged to arm themselves with necessary computer skills and techniques as the same will become valuable once this system is implemented. Some of the functionalities that the system is expected to address on the staff side include but not limited to the following; change and update of personal information like addresses, tracking of contributions made, application of leave and holidays and tracking of the same for approval, communicate with other staff and management easily and effectively, view salary records as well as benefits entitlement at any time among many other functionalities that will be included upon.
Before accessing these services, the new system will require each staff or user to have his credentials verified. This will be for the purposes of security. Each user therefore will be required to have a password which should not be revealed to anybody at any time whatever the circumstances. Kindly note that one of the purposes of implementing this rule is to ensure that there is no un-authorized access that could cause data corruption or leakage.
In general, the mode of operation is expected to change. The normal queues at the human resource department which are characteristic of the current system will no longer be seen. Efficiency will be improved and service delivery will be faster. All staff is urged therefore to cooperate in this process of system development and change-over for effective implementation.
Reference
George, B. & Scott, S. (2009). Managing Human Resources. New York, NY: Cengage Learning
InfoBase systems. (2011). Retrieved on 20th July 2011 from http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/personnel/87112.htm
Umoja (2011).retrieved on 19th July 2011, from http://umoja.un.org/display/umoja/2008/07/18/ERP+-A+business+transformation+project
