User experience key to Altimetrik’s HR choice
- Summary:
- A tech-savvy workforce requires tech-savvy HR, says Altimetrik.
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Global technology services firm Altimetrik evangelizes about making the user experience a priority – giving users what they want, where they want and on the device they want.No surprise then, that these were key capabilities on its own wish list for a new internal human capital management (HCM) solution.
As a consulting and development organization specializing in emerging technologies. Altimetrik’s 2,500 consultants and engineers are extremely tech savvy and they needed an HCM solution to match. The new HCM needed to be cloud-based, mobile-enabled, always available and come with analytics capabilities.
But another fundamental priority was standardization. When the organization was formed through merger in 2012, it inherited three HR systems and as Madhavan Satagopan, Altimetrik’s chief technical officer (CTO) recalls:
Two out of the three acquisitions’ HR systems were highly customized.
One of the three incumbent providers was SAP, but Altimetrik felt that it didn’t match all the company requirements, leaving the choice between a Workday and Oracle solution.
The two platforms offered very similar functionality, but Satagopan felt that Oracle had the edge in terms of its ability to integrate with the company’s enterprise platforms.
As a result, Altimetrik’s People Experience (PE) division – the internal name for its HR unit - is currently implementing Oracle HCM Cloud together with Oracle Project Resource Management Cloud.
Altimetrik was keen to avoid customization and has been able to implement Oracle HCM Cloud with minimal tinkering. With Oracle handling the transactional elements of HR, the people experience team is starting to have more time to focus its efforts on areas such as employee engagement and aligning with company goals.
The aim is that the new platform will bring far more visibility into the workforce and employee performance across the business.
Tech savvy
Satagopan was keen to choose an HR system that was fit for what he calls the “non-linear” structure of its workforce, who were deployed in work initiatives across the business, and had a non-hierarchical career path to match. Satagopan explains:
It was a very important business need, the fact that we’re gearing up for a digital world with a highly digital workforce.
This tech-savvy, digital workforce expect to be connected through social media. Says Satagopan:
At a practical level, that means running ‘ideas-athons’ and hackathons and using crowdsourcing internally to innovate and develop its own products. It also means that productivity is measured in a “non-linear way”.We saw the importance of having content to engage the Generation Y workforce, and that included social media – the way to engage them was not through conventional means.
The organization is now beginning to apply analytics to its workforce issues. Key metric include the employee engagement index. Areas such as the ideas and hackathons come under this category, as they increase the engagement of staff.
Utilization, which Altimetrik defines as the ability to leverage employees for customer facing and solution development work, is another key focus for applying analytics at Altimetrik.
The third key application for analytics is in employee productivity, including help people communicate and build capabilities.
Work in progress
The Oracle roll-out is still in progress and it will be the end of the year before it will be open to all staff worldwide, but Satagopan says he is “happy with the ROI” so far.
Early benefits include a 6% to 7% increase in the utilization of the workforce, together with productivity increases of 7% to 8%, fuelled partly by the ability to engage employees and measure that engagement.
Satogapan is sure that there are many more measurable benefits to follow. As for the future, he says:
Generation X and Generation Y are a very different ball game, so we’re looking to do more engagement and get into their world. We’re trying to understand their behaviors and what they want and what they ask for rather than what they need.
One of the challenges/opportunities in this area is to link benefits and rewards with behavior. The company also wants to start using gamification more. At the moment gamification is confined to a little bit of simulation, but the company wants to expand its application into training.
My take
It’s always interesting to see the technology choices made by organizations which are themselves immersed in producing leading-edge technologies.
Altimetrik’s wish list of always-on, cloud, mobile and analytics represent the key requirements for tech-savvy firms.
But the icing on the cake is having technology that puts the user experience first: if users don’t want to use the technology, then it doesn’t matter how many bells and whistles it flaunts.
Disclosure - at time of writing, Oracle, SAP and Workday are all premier partners of diginomica.
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