Abstract
This chapter intends to reveal the benefit of predated notifications of personal actions for HR-planning and discusses the interrelated demands on ERP-systems. If e-government is implemented, one has to think of rearranging the government’s HR-structure in order to adapt to the new circumstances, too. This means to take advantage of modern HR-methodology in order to become more efficient in HR-administration. One possible way in improving human resource management (HRM) is using predated notifications of personal actions for HR-planning. Human resource planning (HR-planning) is a component of strategic enterprise planning. It is fully integrated into the enterprise-wide planning process, because HR-planning is not only determined by other planning areas, but it also determines them vice versa. So the more precisely and comprehensively HR-planning is done, the more accurate derived key figures, which are used in other planning areas, can be. Governments usually deal with a huge amount of personnel, so HR is one of the main tasks in administration. Predated notifications of personal actions usually are known in present, but will be started in the future. In contrast to planning a personnel action the predated one will take place with the highest possible probability. An example for making the difference more clear may be an employee’s retirement. It does not stringently depend on the employee’s age, but rather on the person’s individual decision to retire. As a general rule, an employee’s intention to retire is already known about half a year before it takes place. If this information is used in the planning process, the company will have enough time to estimate the loss of knowledge or the cost-savings that will be caused by the employee’s withdrawal. In huge companies, HRM typically is supported by ERP-systems. The functionality offered by the software depends on the company’s needs and may range from a simple keeping of personnel data to a complex module called human capital management, which is used for payroll accounting, talent management, employee self services, and many more. If the decision-making body considers the company’s personnel as business critical, a lot of employee-related data is collected and analyzed, ranging from master data to planning key figures. This chapter will emphasize the importance of efficient HR-planning for governments in order to improve their business processes. It can be seen as one of the goals of e-government. It will be pointed out how HR-planning can be improved by using predated notifications of personal actions, so that HR-divisions in governments can use advanced HRplanning right on from the beginning when preparing themselves for e-government.
TopHuman Resources Planning
Human resource management is defined by Scholz (Scholz, 2000) as “the systematical analysis, evaluation and organization of all personnel aspects in a company”. The main task of HRM is deriving HR-goals from the company’s strategic objectives and also assuring the achievement of these objectives (Drumm, 2006). HRM is more than just collecting personnel data. It must not be isolated from other business data used in the company, although personnel data often is considered as severely critical as far as privacy is concerned.
Looking at a company’s manner when dealing with its employees one can suggest what kind of HR-philosophy is dominating. Saying it backwards, it means that HRM guidance is determined by HR-philosophy, which makes a statement about the importance of HR in the company (Müller-Christ, 2005). HRM may have different guidelines. It depends on the decision, whether the employees must be just administrated, or they are joint venturers, who expect a wide supply of services (Müller-Christ, 2005). As an example two different enterprise concepts will be presented. On the one hand a bakery with a lot of chain stores. This type of company needs to administrate a lot of homogenous, lowly trained employees. On the other hand a law firm with highly trained experts, who demand a service from the personnel office.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Personal actions: Personal actions are a bunch of functions to change data in a database consistently. They are implemented in programming routines. These routines use input-data, compute the data according to the selected personal action and generate output-data
Time slot for master data: An employee’s master data often changes in a period of time. This can be his address or bank account number, but also his assignment to an organisational unit or his status. For time-dependency each dataset has a valid-from and a valid-to date. Time slots define the temporal validity of master data restricted by the valid-from and valid-to date of each dataset
Human Resource Management (HRM): Human resource management is defined by Scholz (Scholz, 2000) as “the systematical analysis, evaluation and organization of all personnel aspects in a company”. The main task of HRM is deriving HR-goals from the company’s strategic objectives and also assuring the achievement of these objectives (Drumm, 2006)
Human Resource planning (HR-planning): HR-planning is an important part of HRM. It includes all activities that are used for planning the quantity and quality as well as the personal actions, which have an impact on the HR-structure (Müller-Christ, 2005). Kolb says, HR-planning “is the systematic anticipation of future actions concerning a company’s personnel” (Kolb, 1998:pp#). The main objective is to assign strategic enterprise aims to HR and to prepare the personnel systematically for future requirements with the use of personal actions, so that the target achievement will be maximized (Schanz, 2000). Important constraints are given by the law, so that not all action alternatives may be permitted (Olfert, 2006). Finally the effectivity and availability of human resources has to be maximized (Kossbiel, 1999)
Pre-dated notification: A pre-dated notification is a future event with a maximum probability of occurrence, which is started with input-data and whose action has a deterministic effect on the environment. Actions can be executed simultaneously or sequentially, but they all have the probability of occurrence of 1 (unity)
Employee self-services (ESS): Employee self-services have been invented in order to make HR-administration more efficient by transferring administrative workload to the employees. Commonly an enterprise portal is used as user interface, which is directly connected to the database. Employees are allowed to maintain certain master data themselves, like address or vacancy-dates. ESS made administrative HR-processes faster up to 50% (Hunter Group, 2000)