Global Insights Gleaned at IHRIM 2013 Conference

IHRIM Eye Guest Blogger - Lexy Martin, CedarCrestone

When I attend a conference, I like to pick a theme for the sessions I will attend. This year, I chose the sessions covering “going global.” This is my term for those organizations operating in multiple countries, taking their HR systems global. There were several sessions that covered this theme and two stood out.

The first, SaaS in the Trenches: Real World Pros and Cons, with Joe Almodovar, Senior Director Global HRIS, A.T. Kearney and Jeanne Kalinowski, Director HRIS, Hyatt Hotels Corp. covered these two global organizations’ SaaS work. The gist of the session is that SaaS is still an HRIS and just because it’s SaaS doesn’t mean you deviate from good practices during due diligence, contract review, project plans, vendor selection, staffing, security, and configuration. But it is an HRIS of a different color around implementation timing, staffing differences, frequent releases and vendor support. They gave common-sense advice on the fact that SaaS still requires due diligence particularly pre-sales where organizations should spend lots of time up front to avoid issues on the back end. “As you can’t customize, good due diligence is a must.”

The global-specific advice included the following:

·         Inquire about language packs – how much do they cost and how priced? How are they updated? What’s coming? Which modules are multi-language capable?
·         Can they support multi-byte character sets for Asia?
·         Maintenance windows – what days and times? Frequency? Consider impact to your global business. If your operations work Saturdays when the vendor wants to do maintenance, you have an issue.
·         Black-out periods are particularly impactful for global organizations that operate everywhere. The provider may be US-centric but your operations are not. Find out when!
·         Data Privacy – have they reviewed their operations from a data privacy perspective? Find EMEA/Asia customer references and discuss how they manage data privacy issues.
 
Another great session was Inspect What You Expect: Building a Global Framework for Business Success, with Pat Crane, Regional Vice President and John Gibbons, Vice President, Research and Strategy from Jeitosa Group International.

The two provided a framework for understanding the complexity and business impact of data structures, language translations, business processes, and compliance to gauge vendors with global solutions.

Data structures are the easiest to support but provide the least business impact. Nevertheless, they are important. Things like data structures for international names, addresses, and telephone numbers, along with country-specific fields like religion in Germany, Hukou in China, etc. should be accommodated.

 

Language translation should be provided and done well to achieve some positive business impact. For example, the vendor should translate self-service screens not only for the employee but also for functions used by the HR partner and back-office administrators. Look to see whether the vendor provides for translation of code and table values as well as free-form text translations.

Business process level of globalization is much more complex for the vendor and represents significant business benefit for the organization. Here, the solution should allow for different business processes by country and region. The example provided was a discussion of the complexities of employment and severance agreements, vacation accrual and time off policies, and global benefits and pension programs in some countries.

Global compliance was the fourth level of vendor globalization and while the most complex to achieve, provides the organization with the greatest business value. Discerning how well the vendor supports your ability to comply globally with legislation around the world beyond simple data capture is key. Also understanding whether the vendor can provide for global governance, compliance, and data privacy and protection is critical.

One conclusion of the speakers was that “Global” vendors tend to be more mature with regard to data structures and language translations; however, there is considerable less maturity when it comes to global business processes and compliance. One item of particular value provided by the speakers was a sample scorecard to use to evaluate vendors under consideration. I highly recommend listening/viewing their presentation, available at http://bit.ly/IHRIM2013_Recordings.