Balancing Considerations

No matter how large an enterprise gets it will always be faced with the simple reality that there is ultimately a limit to the resource available.

Planning and long-term road maps are an essential tool for progress to be made and resource and ambition to be matched. The classic example for this is in car infotainment which was road mapped long before the technology existed to ever implement the vision. The value of that planning was still being realised two decades later. We have a long list of things that we would like to bring to our system and must balance that with the enhancement and maintenance of the long list of things which are included in the system as standard. We must also balance this against the changing technology and the latest buzz words whilst not creating additional costs for our clients.

Within software and computing planning can prove to be challenging as the pace of change is rapid. There are two distinct branches to this change, improvement, and hype. Improvements are the things which can be realised in practice to bring benefits today. Hype tends to relate to things which are certainly interesting in concept but have significant practical hurdles to overcome before they can be considered as improvements.

Two reasonably recent examples of fads are Blockchain and AI. Both of which are certainly useful. However, the media hype of complete imminent revolution caused by one or the other is much further than one sleep away. In fairness to each technology, they have a part to play currently although in very particular circumstances which the technology acknowledges through its design.

Blockchain, as it is computationally intensive, continues to struggle with power and processing requirements. It does have a place in the world, most famously crypto currency, although it has also shown that for all the effort it does not actually prevent theft. This is perhaps a good example of 80% of the effort being made for 20% of the benefit; existing systems face the same ultimate problems but arrive there much more efficiently.

Within the last year the craze is AI with tools such as ChatGPT making its debut. This represents interesting technology although it again has significant problems. One of those issues is its users. Academics keen to know if student papers were written by an AI have asked an AI; the AI could not possibly know so gives a random answer for which a student may be penalised. The academic is clearly the problem in that scenario but in broader context humans are too willing to trust based on their belief in a system rather than seeking evidence. In technical terms these AI language models also (currently) suffer from lacking real time information as well as depending on information created by humans (which may have its own inaccuracies or agendas present). As tools which allow conversation, they remain highly interesting.

Within HR a technology such as blockchain would be difficult to yield a benefit from that would be more than existing transactional technologies. Current AI would be incapable of giving trustworthy advice if it were integrated into such systems. Where the latter may be interesting is in calculating leave etc. although there are plenty of tools which allow this type of activity to be completed efficiently.

For software development and consumption there are also issues with development approaches and how software is ultimately delivered. These things also need to be evaluated and considered as they can have significant impact on what direction a software company should take.

Within software development there are various architectures and patterns which are marketed from time to time. It is important to consider that these things do have a marketing angle, whilst they may also have an academic aspect it needs to be remembered that where there is work there is money. An example of this may be the software architecture of micro services. This is where a software system is split into small functional components which are themselves independent of the whole but together form a complete system. In concept this has some advantages but in practice it also helps sell the additional resource of networking (in addition to just compute and storage). A difference which appears to provide a concrete financial benefit to a cloud provider whilst giving others something more abstract.

For hosting and architecture, the trend has been toward cloud-based software as a service solutions. More recently the cost of cloud hosting for predictable workloads has begun to be understood. In the same way booking a flexible plane ticket is more expensive than one for a specified date, so is booking flexible computing resources. A significant advantage of using the cloud is flexibility, however when a workload is predictable there may well be more economical options. Some software as a service providers are starting to move workloads from the cloud to their own data centres as a cost saving exercise. In a similar way cloud vendors offer on premise ‘cloud’ solutions such as AWS Outposts. One reason for this is the location of the data being processed making legal compliance easier. Another is due to latency; sending and retrieving data to remote locations adds time to computation. There is also the management of risk whereby a facility should not become dependent on a single piece of infrastructure such as internet connections.

When considering long term planning for our products it is essential that we have sight of these trends and technologies and how they may play out in the future. It is also essential to remember that our system is fundamentally a flexible data management system. As with any HR and T&A system our primary purpose is to provide a centralised data collection point; that data can then be used for secondary activities such as analysis and reporting.

As a mature platform it can also be challenging to keep up with how basic the traditional and basic features of HR systems have been remarketed and recharged. An example of this is seen in marketing terms such as ‘form builders’ etc. which has always been a basic feature of our system available to all users for no extra charge. It can be easy to forget that the system already has hundreds of features. Something that clients too also forget which can sometimes make our consultants feel as thought they are conjuring magic by running through basic features which provide genuine benefit.

In the case of the current work, we are undertaking on the web client a great deal of effort has been put into making changes which will never be seen by the end users. The purpose of these updates is largely to prepare for the future. It would be great if we were able to share the complete details of where we would like to go but as discussed above, we must constantly re-evaluate so making promises is ill advised.

What we have done is to consider some areas of inefficiency. We identified that one of our calendars did not deliver data to the user in the best way. Where the calendar was asked to display data for 1000+ employees the amount of data transferred to the user became excessive. The redesign of that calendar will mean that it now requires approximately 10% of the original data volume be sent to the client to display the same information. This is in addition to being able to enhance the look, feel and customisability of the calendar. We have also been able to increase the amount of information available in another of our calendars whilst reducing its data footprint. Whilst this type of change is unlikely to make a dramatic change it is something that we can do to help reduce our resource usage day to day.

Another way we have looked towards the future is to consider how a client will be able to make the system even more their own. We want a client to be able to remove all our branding and logo’s, the client’s corporate vision is more important than our own. As discussed previously another angle we have considered is how we can have a positive impact on a work force by doing some simple employee positive things like including (customisable) background images.

In the background we have also been working to consider how we can use the platform better. This has provided some significant technical challenges. An initial benefit of this work has been to unlock additional T&A functionality through the web client. In the longer term this will allow us to offer more composition options within screens; allowing for richer interfaces and for users to have more choice in what items are displayed when and where. This would be in addition to the comprehensive choices already available.

The update is overall designed to retain familiarity with the existing version to make transition simple for employees. By making a series of small changes over time rather than large or dramatic changes all at once we hope to allow clients to be able to adopt change easily. What we want to avoid is introducing any burden of retraining staff or a feeling of becoming lost in a ‘new’ system.

As development continues, we will start working towards planning the roll out of the update to clients. Initially we will contact select clients and invite them to trial the updated version with their staff. This is not part of technical testing but will allow us to receive some feedback on the changes in case there is anything we need to understand better. Once this phase of the project is completed we will make the update generally available and contact clients to arrange a convenient time to upgrade them.

More Information

If you would like more information regarding People Inc. and the web client, please contact us on 01908 265111, or click the button below to request a call-back.

Related Features

The People Inc. system provides extensive functionality to help manage employee absence. Links to some examples are provided below:

Employee Self Service

Information and features of the Employee Self Service module.

People Inc. - HR Software Solution

An overview of the People Inc. HR system.

People Inc. Time

Time and Attendance, rostering, overtime etc. integrated with People Inc.

External Resources

Listed below are some links to additional information related to this article. The links go to pages on external websites. These links are given for reference only.

• OpenAI (ChatGPT) (www.openai.com) - External Link.

• Blockchain (www.wikipedia.org) - External Link.

• Microservices (www.wikipedia.org) - External Link.