HR ADMINISTRATION

AND HRIS
KAVANAGH, M. J., & JOHNSON, R. D. (EDS.). (2017). HUMAN
RESOURCE INFORMATION SYSTEMS: BASICS, APPLICATIONS, AND
FUTURE DIRECTIONS. SAGE PUBLICATIONS.

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OBJECTIVES
• Understand the basic role of job analysis in human resources and explain
the role of HRIS in supporting job analysis
• Discuss the complexity of HR administration and the advantages of an HRIS
over a “paper-and-pencil” HR operation
• Discuss the advantages of having a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for
the HRIS
• Differentiate among the four structural approaches to HR administration
service delivery (i.e., self-service portals, shared-service centers, human
resource outsourcing, and offshoring)
• Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each of the four structural
approaches to HR administration
• Understand how legal compliance with government mandates is an
important part of HRIS functionality and how these mandates add to the 2
complexity of an HRIS in both domestic and multinational organizations.
“HUMAN RESOURCES ISN’T A THING WE
DO. IT’S THE THING THAT RUNS OUR
BUSINESS.

—Steve Wynn
”
Record keeping, updating policy and informational materials for a self-service portal,
generating and disseminating internal reports, complying with governmentally
mandated external reporting, and administering labor contracts are all examples of
HRM administration associated with managing an organization’s workforce.
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INTRODUCTION

• Approximately 65% to 75% of all HR activities are transactional (Wright, McMahan,

Snell, & Gerhart, 1998).
• Human resource information systems (HRIS) are vital tools in managing these
increasingly complex transactional requirements.
• It is crucial that the employee database, frequently referred to as the employee
master file, be carefully constructed so that the information is accurate and
timely.
• The employee master file is a record and repository for all relevant employee
information and must be created prior to any other modules for programs, such as
recruiting and applicant tracking.
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TECHNICAL SUPPORT FOR JOB
ANALYSIS
• A primary goal of an effective HR department is to ensure that the organization has the
best available people working in the proper jobs at the appropriate time to maximize
the organization’s productive capacity in pursuit of strategic goal achievement.
• The organization must know not only what each job entails, but also what knowledge,
skills, and abilities (KSA) are necessary to perform the job successfully.
• Job analysis provides both types of information – the process of systematically obtaining
information about jobs by determining the duties, tasks, or activities of jobs, from which
KSA can be estimated.
• From this analysis, job descriptions can be developed.

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TECHNICAL SUPPORT FOR JOB
DESCRIPTION
• Job descriptions define the working contract between the employee and the
organization.
• Job descriptions uses include:
• (1) evidence for any litigation involving unfair discrimination in hiring, promoting, or terminating
employees;
• (2) development of all the HRM programs, especially talent management in organizations, and other
important HRM programs including recruitment, selection, training, and performance appraisal;
• (3) development of compensation structures; and
• (4) employee disciplinary programs and union grievances. In fact, job descriptions are often termed
the “heart” of the HRM system.
• Job descriptions is critically important and must be accurate and timely.
• Effectively managed HR departments capture and store the results of all job analysis and job
descriptions within the HRIS to facilitate future changes in jobs required by reorganizations,
mergers/acquisitions, technology, and market-driven customer expectations.
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APPROACHES AND TECHNIQUES
• Job analysis involves the following phases or considerations:
• Identify the sources of information about the job. The best sources are usually
job incumbents and their supervisors; however, professional job analysts can
be used for newly created or complex jobs. Identify the types of job
information needed.
• This information can include tasks, duties, responsibilities, the knowledge
required, performance standards, job context, and the equipment used.
• Determine the appropriate methods of collecting the job data.
• Consider using one or more of the standardized techniques for conducting job
analysis to enhance the final job description, for example, functional job
analysis, the position analysis questionnaire (PAQ), task inventory
analysis, or the critical incident method (see Ghorpade, 1988).
• Regardless of the approach or technique used to analyze the jobs in an
organization, the outcome must obtain accurate and timely job 7

descriptions.
 HRIS APPLICATIONS
• The utilization of technology, including Web-based job analysis
tools, has increased the availability of information supporting job
analysis, reduced costs of collecting information, and enhanced
convenience of collecting and analyzing information.
will be
• Completing job analyses and deriving job descriptions can be
accomplished through online survey techniques.
• Job analysis questionnaires can be administered online to job
incumbents and supervisors, and the resulting job descriptions
can be analyzed statistically to finalize job descriptions.
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 HRIS APPLICATIONS
• Maintaining accurate job descriptions can also be aided by an
HRIS.
• Service-oriented architecture with self-service portals for
employees and managers can be used to make sure that job
will be
descriptions remain accurate and timely.
• Annual review of all job descriptions to maintain their timeliness
– employee performance. Easy to generate a copy of the current
job description to accompany each request for a job
performance evaluation.
9

• With accurate and timely job descriptions, human resource

planning (HRP) is now possible.
THE HRIS ENVIRONMENT AND OTHER
ASPECTS OF HR ADMINISTRATION

• HRIS can assist managers charged with improving the

efficiency of HR administration by:
• reducing costs,
• enhancing the reliability of reporting,
• improving service to internal customers, and
• facilitating strategic goal achievement.

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THE HRIS ENVIRONMENT AND HR
ADMINISTRATION

• Information technology facilitates administration in multiple

ways.
• First, an HRIS can help improve data accuracy by:
• (1) reducing the need for multiple inputs,
• (2) eliminating redundancies in data, and
• (3) reducing the opportunity for human input errors and associated
corrections.
• (4) speeds the process of building reports with simple query capabilities.
• (5) May support differences in reporting mandated by global
governmental jurisdictions. 11

• (6) Secure global distribution of data while providing the desired privacy
HRM ADMINISTRATIVE ISSUES
• HR managers face a variety of other administrative
requirements in the rapidly evolving HRIS era. The
HRM administrative issues:
• (1) organizational approaches for providing HR in a global
economy (i.e., self- service portals, SSCs, outsourcing,
offshoring);
• (2) compliance mandates for record maintenance and
report requirements (which are associated both with
government laws. e.g., Occupational Safety and 12

Health Act [OSHA]) and with the labor laws)

HRM ADMINISTRATION AND
ORGANIZING APPROACHES
• HR managers operated as adjunct staff to organizations, overseeing the daily transactions
associated with hiring, paying, or training employees and reporting on employee issues as
required by managers in organizations.

• As organizations grew more complex, administering these daily transactions also grew more
complex.

• Modern HR professionals use technology to more effectively support administrative activities

and reduce organizational costs while improving data accuracy, employee productivity, and
customer service.

• Global companies reported that, even with challenging economic conditions, they anticipated
growing their technology commitment for strategic human capital talent management, as well
as for workforce management, service delivery, and business intelligence.

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SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE
AND EXTENSIBLE MARKUP LANGUAGE
• It is focused on providing overall service that is well defined, self-contained, and context and platform
independent; in other words, it is focused on adding value to the organization’s business purpose rather
than simply adding technological value.
• SOA is a collection of internal and external services that can communicate with each other by point-to-
point data exchange or through coordination among different services to achieve a business purpose.
• The architectural benefits of SOA include (Campbell & Mohun, 2007)
• IT consolidation opportunities and standards-based integration, using a standards-based
approach to integration for IT systems that are very complex and heterogeneous to reduce both
cost and complexity over time;
• Faster implementation and change management through reuse, modeling, and composite
development; and
• Improved alignment of business processes and IT implementation.
• SOA XML that combines text and other information about the text, such as its structure, allowing data
sharing across different information systems via the Internet
• XML improves interface technology through platform independence and protocols, such as security and
transactions, previously unavailable in interfaces
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FIGURE 8.1 SOA BUSINESS MODELING
PROCESS

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ADVANTAGES OF XML-ENHANCED
SOA
• security is improved—this is especially important because of the privacy protection issues
associated with HR data and applications;
• performance is enhanced—this aids in reducing transaction costs and increasing customer
satisfaction;
• auditing capabilities are added—this supports the growing demand to demonstrate
compliance with corporate quality and policy mandates; change capabilities are enhanced
—this improves reaction time to better meet business-driven change requirements; and
• alternative HR administration structures (e.g., self-service portals, SSCs, outsourcing) are
facilitated—this encourages HR managers to consider multiple approaches to meeting the
HR administration goals of cost reduction and service improvement.

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SELF-SERVICE PORTAL, SHARED-SERVICE
CENTER & HUMAN RESOURCES
OUTSOURCING
• The self-service portal is an electronic access point to an organization’s HRM
information, such as company policies, benefits schedules, an individual’s payroll
data, or other records; access may be via the organization’s computers and intranet
or remotely from other locations via the Internet.
• A shared-service center (SSC) is a technology-enabled HRM group focused on value
creation by providing excellent service to internal customers while reducing costs
through increased efficiency and continuous improvement.
• Human resources outsourcing (HRO) is the practice of contracting with vendors to
perform HR services and activities.
• Offshoring is an extension of outsourcing that involves contracting with vendors
outside a nation’s boundaries to effect additional cost savings or gain other benefits
over domestic outsourcing alone. 17
FIGURE 8.2 TYPICAL HRM
ADMINISTRATION SERVICE DELIVERY
ALTERNATIVES

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THEORY AND HR ADMINISTRATION
• The first theory that explains alternative approaches to HR administration is
the resource-based view of the firm (Barney, 1991, 2001).
• Barney (1991, 2001), in delineating the resource-based view of organizations,
argued that organizations are bundles of resources, identified as physical
capital, organizational capital, and human capital.
• Physical capital includes an organization’s technology, geographic locations, physical
assets (e.g., plants, money), and access to raw material.
• Organizational capital includes its formal reporting structure; its coordinating, planning,
and organizing systems; and its internal and external group relationships.
• Human capital includes the experience, capabilities, relationships, and insights of individual
employees. Taken together, these resources are combined and managed to determine an
organization’s opportunity to win sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace.
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THEORY AND HR ADMINISTRATION
• To achieve sustainable competitive advantage, a firm’s resources, when compared with those
of its competitors, must be valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and invulnerable to substitutes.
• Based on this theory, then, it is likely that innovative combinations of technology (physical
capital), organizing systems (organizational capital), and strategic individual knowledge, skills,
and abilities may serve to give an organization a strategic position in its marketplace.
• HR administrative approaches seek to combine HR technology (e.g., HRIS and Internet) with
organizing systems (e.g., self- service portals) and strategic HR knowledge, skills, and abilities
(e.g., compensation expertise) to leverage a specific firm’s competitive position.
• It is important to note that this theory suggests that each firm in an industry is likely to acquire
resources such as human talent to support its unique combinations based on its strategic
choices; it is this unique combination that leads to sustainable competitive advantage.
• Merely benchmarking or following trends is unlikely to lead to sustainable competitive positioning
for a firm!
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THEORY AND HR ADMINISTRATION
• A second theory that explains alternative approaches to HR administration is
transaction cost theory (Coase, 1937; Williamson, 1975).
• Transaction cost theory suggests that organizations can choose to purchase the
goods and services they need in the competitive marketplace or make those goods
and services internally.
• Transaction costs are the expenses associated with an economic transaction,
whether internal or external.
• Managers can compare the transaction costs required to purchase products or
services, such as contract administration, licenses, and delivery services, from
external providers with those incurred in providing the same product or service
internally by, for example, using additional personnel, retraining employees, or
purchasing hardware and software.
• managers can make optimum economic decisions for their organizations.
• This decision is the classic “make or buy” economic choice facing rational 21
economic actors.
• Both resource-based and transaction cost theories can explain the different choices
 SELF-SERVICE PORTALS AND HRIS
• employee self-service (ESS) HR portals, provides an electronic means for a company’s
employees to access its HR services and information. Such portals provide a single sign-on
capability for employees, who can individually complete transactions for their personal data.
• ESS portals can range from simple intranet websites that allow employees to access static HR
policies, such as safety requirements, to sophisticated Internet websites that allow employees to
access and change their individual records.
• In addition to providing an interface for current employees, ESS portals are also available to
prospective employees
• Manager self-service (MSS) portals are becoming more prevalent in organizations as well.
• MSS portals are specialized versions of ESS portals designed to allow managers to view extensive
information about their subordinates and perform many administrative tasks electronically,
including traditional HR functions.
• MSS is not limited to HR functions and may also include budgeting and tracking, reporting, and
staff policy and procedure development (Gueutal & Falbe, 2005; Walker, 2001).
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SAMPLE EMPLOYEE SELF-SERVICE SCREEN

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24
ADVANTAGES OF SELF-SERVICE
PORTALS FOR HR ADMINISTRATION
• Self-service portals provide several advantages for achieving HR administration goals, including:
• improved speed and quality of service to employees and managers and
• simplified routine inquiries and changes. Reducing the number of inquiry transactions requiring direct HR staff
involvement helps keep information current.
• Self-service portals also enhance employee satisfaction by permitting employees to control when and where
such access activities occur, empowering employees, increasing their productivity, especially for those who
travel frequently, and offering privacy for those who prefer to handle such matters without the presence of
coworkers.
• self- service portals facilitate easy, increased access to HR information, helping employees ensure that
important personal data (such as individual job performance appraisals used by managers in making decisions
about salary increases, promotions, or other employment rewards) are accurate and current.
• Self-service portals help reduce the number of transactions for HR employees and, correspondingly, overall HR
costs

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DISADVANTAGES OF SELF-SERVICE
PORTALS FOR HR ADMINISTRATION
• Although HR administrators can gain advantages from deploying self-service portals,
they are also faced with multiple disadvantages.
• Permitting employees to access company data through self-service portals may increase the possibility
of security breaches and the associated negative outcomes, like identity theft, for affected employees.
• Employees are concerned that even having their data in a company’s HRIS can lead to misuse of such
information by others in the organization and may feel their privacy is invaded when organizations fail
to limit access to personal data housed in HRIS (Phillips, Isenhour, & Stone, 2008).

• Privacy and security issues will be discussed in more detail later.

• HR managers should recognize and take action to ameliorate such perceptions and
concerns as part of the project management planning and implementation process for
an HRIS.

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SHARED-SERVICE CENTERS AND HRIS

• SSCs, generally appeared in response to the increasing

globalization of competitive markets occasioned by the
proliferation of multinational enterprises (MNEs).
• Some organizations have described them as “centers of
excellence”.

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COMMON ELEMENTS OF SSCS

1. Centralizing or decentralizing of business processes

2. Using economies of scale to reduce unit costs
3. Developing customer relationship models to better meet
the needs of customers
4. Concentrating on cost reduction to enhance competitive
positioning Deploying quality tools to ensure continuous
process improvement.
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SHARED-SERVICE CENTER
• To be successful, a shared-service center are necessary to allow internal customers to assess the value of the
consolidated unit and to facilitate continuous improvement by SSC managers.
• Accenture (2007) outlined several principles to embrace when considering the use of SSCs:
• Establish a “global good” vision for the SSC that includes its definition and benefits to ensure that business
units “losing” functions are willing to make the commitment to transfer their work.
• Identify leaders, in all the affected groups, to sponsor the SSC vision, promote the center’s value to the
organization, and serve as responsible change agents.
• Support transparency regarding who (e.g., affected employees), what (e.g., which functions), when (e.g.,
transition plans), and where (e.g., location of the new center). This openness is essential to building the
trust needed to initiate and maintain the center’s effectiveness.
• Conduct initial and ongoing customer “values and requirements” meetings to build trust, establish
performance and service expectations, and solve problems. Implementing jointly acceptable measures
facilitates SSC success and internal customer satisfaction.
• Focus on viewing the SSC’s processes in the context of the overall business functions. Examine the process
behind each function from “end to end.” Understanding the context of all processes in each function
encourages the recognition of the interdependencies inherent in the SSC concept and bolsters the value- 29
creating goal of SSCs
FUNCTIONS IN SHARED SERVICES

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 ADVANTAGES OF SHARED-SERVICE
CENTERS FOR HR ADMINISTRATION
• Advantages of SSCs for HR include:
• Permitting HR administration managers to focus on delivering the timely, high-quality transactions necessary
to fulfill corporate requirements, such as mandated governmental reporting, and
• Removing the artificial barriers inherent in the generalist-specialist continuum common in HR organizations,
smoothing work and communication processes.
• Combining such transactional responsibilities into a single business unit encourages the unit to focus on
customer satisfaction with specific user interactions, such as responses to employee questions or requests for
assistance.
• Frees specialists to focus on more strategic activities.
• Encourage the efficiency and standardization necessary to support strategic cost-control goals by
consolidating individuals responsible for transactions, providing organizations with greater motivation to
redesign procedures and create more effective ones.

• Finally, such centers facilitate development of the measures of efficiency, quality, and customer
responsiveness that are necessary to demonstrate appropriate contributions to strategic goals.

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DISADVANTAGES OF SHARED-SERVICE
CENTERS FOR HR MANAGERS
• organizations combine multiple, unrelated shared services into a combined
business unit.
• May lead to unanticipated power shifts in organizations.
• Can lead to depersonalization.
• Line managers, accustomed to personal contact with HR professionals, may feel isolated when
handling transactions through self-service portals.
• They may feel abandoned when traditional communication patterns are disrupted because
specialists have been consolidated in SSCs.
• Because such units are concerned with efficiency and cost controls, individuals working in them
can become more involved with the technology with which they work and less involved with
others who are engaged in the day-to-day aspects of the business.
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 OUTSOURCING AND HRIS
• The third approach to HR administration, outsourcing, is the practice of contracting with vendors to perform one or
more HR services and activities. This has been described as the HR version of the make-buy decision described

• Outsourcing is not new in HR administration

• HRO firms are hardly uniform. There are many different types of providers, reflecting the diverse needs of
organizations.

• Outsourcing contracts should include specific pricing agreements (e.g., flat or fixed fee per process or per
employee served, unit prices per transaction levels, hourly and overtime rates, revenue sharing, risk-reward
sharing, failure penalties), expected performance and associated measures (e.g., transaction quality standards,
error rates, system availability and downtime, customer satisfaction levels, hours of operation), and terms and
conditions (e.g., start and end dates, extensions permitted, termination agreements, dispute resolution procedures,
audit procedures).

• Obviously, HR administration managers would require significant assistance from multiple groups such as the legal,
operations, and information systems departments within the organization to establish and monitor the contract,
ensuring that the organization is adequately protected from incompetent or unethical outsourcing providers.
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ADVANTAGES OF HR OUTSOURCING
• The advantages of HR administration outsourcing can be both financial
and strategic
• To reduce ongoing expenses for employees and software, forestalling capital
expenditures for new buildings and equipment.
• The ability of the organization to better focus on its core business by transforming
the HR function.
• Could free HR professionals to focus on strategic issues, such as talent
management, while providing the firm with skilled transactional and professional
services in HR functional areas such as compensation and in administrative areas
such as governmental compliance and regulations.
• Services would be powered by the up-to-date technology provided by the external
vendor.
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DISADVANTAGES OF HR
OUTSOURCING
• HRO is the likelihood that the organization will not achieve its strategic goals
• HRO includes the loss of institutional expertise in the outsourced functions, making an HRO
decision reversal difficult or impossible.
• Security risks in multivendor outsourcing, internal employee and manager resistance, compliance
failures, and cultural clashes between the organization and its vendors.
• The effort to bring functionality back in-house, also known as backsourcing, can be expensive,
as firms pay to reorganize twice: first when outsourcing a function and again when it is
backsourced.
• In summary, HRO is another approach to HR administration that offers potential for cost reduction,
process improvement, and employee satisfaction. However, managers of HR administrative
functions must be highly skilled at using HRO strategically to achieve organizational goals.

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OFFSHORING AND HRIS

• The final approach to HR administration, offshoring, is an

expansion of HR outsourcing that includes sending work
outside the Mlaaysia to vendors located in other countries.
• Technological capabilities and global competition have
combined to make HRO a global business, and offshoring for
MNEs is quite complex.
• For example, if an Australian airline has call centers in India to obtain
improved cost performance, why not have its SSC for HR there as well?
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TYPES OF HR OFFSHORING
• When their organizations pursued offshoring, HR managers reported that
manufacturing functions were most common (43%), followed by IT (29%) and
computer programming (22%), customer call centers (29%), and HR functions
(16%).
• Offshore ownership may include opening a new subsidiary in the foreign
country, entering into a joint venture with an existing firm in that country, or
purchasing an existing firm.
• Offshore ownership is riskier than simple offshore outsourcing. In addition to
appropriate strategic and financial due diligence, organizations considering
offshore ownership must pay particular attention to
• ready availability of necessary employee knowledge, skills, and abilities such as language;
• information and communication systems compatibility with HRIS; government regulations and
legal employment requirements such as wage laws;
37
• political stability of the country for facility and employee security; and cultural differences such
as expectations about participative versus directive supervision.
SUMMARY OF HR ADMINISTRATION
APPROACHES
• Based on the previous discussion, it is clear that HR administration
managers have a number of approaches that can contribute to the
goals of reducing costs, improving efficiency, and increasing service
levels for internal customers.
• It is also important that such alternatives be pursued consistent with
each organization’s strategic plan to achieve sustainable competitive
advantage in its industry.
• Multiple approaches may be appropriate based on those strategic goals.
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LEGAL COMPLIANCE AND HR
ADMINISTRATION
• The country and its general environment constitute a major effect on HRM and
on the development and implementation of HRIS (Beaman, 2002).
• Whether the organization pursues a “domestic only” strategy (i.e., doing
business in only one country) or an MNE approach, countries’ government and
labor laws are important external forces in establishing the context for business
(Hersch, 1991).
• The labor laws provide the foundation of employee protections in the workplace.
• There are a number of laws in the Malaysia prohibiting unfair discrimination on
the basis of employee sex, race, age, and disability.

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LAW MALAYSIA AND HRIS

• Employment Act
• EPF
• SOCSO
• OSHA
• Trade Union Act
• Industrial Relation Act
• etc
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OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY
ADMINISTRATIVE FUNCTIONS

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TECHNOLOGY, HR ADMINISTRATION,
AND MANDATED GOVERNMENTAL
REPORTING
• HRIS records can be established coincident with the employee application.
• HR employees can handle the complete reporting function without
interrupting productive time in operational units.
• Changes in mandated reporting requirements (e.g., an increase in the
number of job classifications) can be handled mechanically by HR, without
the involvement of field employees.
• Electronic reporting (i.e., computer to computer) can ensure timely receipt
of reports.

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 TECHNOLOGY, HR ADMINISTRATION,
AND MANDATED GOVERNMENTAL
REPORTING
• If an ESS portal is available, government-mandated changes can be accomplished more easily,
even when individual employees must be involved.
• If an SSC is added to the HR portal capabilities, individual employees with questions about the
reporting requirements can contact the center directly for assistance.
• The supervisor need not be involved, and employees will receive rapid responses, which will allow
them to complete the update more quickly and accurately.
• HRIS, augmented by HR portals (i.e., ESS and MSS portals) and SSCs, can substantially improve
the accuracy and timeliness of mandated governmental reporting, while reducing the hours
wasted on routine administrative work, hours that could be spent more productively.
• HR portals, SSCs, and even outsourcing can facilitate OSHA record keeping and reporting,
reducing costs and enhancing timely reporting
• Updates can be handled with minimal effort.
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THANK YOU

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