InformationWeek

July 10, 2000

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Automation Transforms Human Resources

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Katt says Baxter's employee stock-purchase plan is entirely Web-based, and the most recent merit reviews of 15,000 employees and 4,000 managers in the United States and Puerto Rico were done on the Web. "It used to be fax, Excel, paper, pencil, more faxes-it was maddening," Katt says. Of the 46,000 worldwide employees, 17,000 are "connected-community" people like Katt. She says the information provided by all of the employees feeding information into HRIS could lead to some interesting trend reports, but she's cautious about creating too many new metrics. "The only thing worse than no metrics is bad metrics," she says.

Although Katt says there's a fear among some that automation will decrease the number of HR jobs, she says that new tools and employee self-service will just increase the level of skills required in HR. Bringing the people to a higher level can be automated to some extent with online knowledge-management products.

photo by Jim Marshall At Wells Fargo & Co. in San Francisco, HR knowledge-management software from Authoria Inc. has helped bridge the time needed to train staff in the HR call center. Carol Johnson, manager for the bank's human-resource center project-management department, says the software lets representatives search options based on information and questions from an employee. Authoria software then creates a customized response back to the customer-service representative's screen. The question and answer are then logged on to Authoria for future reference.

The knowledge-base software is customizable from 19,000 pre-configured business rules and 9,000 variables available through pull-down menus, Authoria CEO Tod Loofbourrow says. Wells Fargo uses the program to help the 45 customer-service reps in the call center reference payroll, employment, compensation, time-off, and leave-policy questions at the employee-group level for its 104,000 employees. An additional benefit has been the ease of integrating new personnel practices during the recent merger with Norwest Bank, Johnson says. Authoria products were used to create summary plan descriptions for the benefits plans and integrate with Norwest's PeopleSoft HRMS system.

A typical Authoria license is a "six-figure cost," depending on the number of employees and tools used, says Loofbourrow. Johnson wouldn't say what Wells Fargo paid, but she says that calculated return on investment will be less than 16 months. "That's secondary to the soft benefits," says Johnson. "Less time training. Less time looking up the right answer for an individual. More customized answers for the employee. It's as simple as that."

Wells Fargo is bringing Authoria to the employee level for individual knowledge-base searches via the Internet by this fall. But while employees will be able to look up information and pose what-if questions on subjects such as going from part-time to full-time, they won't be able to make more than personal-informational changes to their files. High-level personnel data will still be managed by the HR department.

But that may change. HR managers have been asking ERP vendors for tools that are customer-facing and Web-enabled for three years, says C-Bridge's Driscoll. However, she says, there will always be old-school professionals who think HR is a face-to-face business. In a hot job market with a worldwide virtual workforce, that face may be hard to find. Josh Greenbaum, an analyst at Enterprise Application Consultants says, "For HR managers it's good news, bad news. At first the new information becomes critical to the organization. Ultimately, that trend can lead to more HR outsourcing."