Reference no: EM133180433

Question A1

Read the following case study and answer the subsequent questions.

Case Study: Olive Company Planning Organizations.

If you think a thorough, high-quality needs analysis is daunting on an internal project, imagine if you were an HRIS vendor and your job was to provide a best-of-breed system that meets most of your many different client's needs. Such an approach makes planning and needs analysis more challenging because difficult choices must be made as to the functionality that is sufficiently broad to go into a general market package. It is costly to vendors, and indeed may be infeasible, to include functionality that is so specific that only a small portion of a system's client base benefits from the function. Consider the following hypothetical company, Olive Partners, which provides a specific market niche HRIS product: benefits administration software. Its challenge: Provide comprehensive benefits administration software that meets the needs of a growing and complex benefits marketplace. According to Davis Hunter, a former employee of Olive.

Olive Partners (name changed to protect confidentiality) was only doing defined benefit pension plans for large employers (30,000+ employees). When you focus your business opportunities on Fortune 100 companies, it limits your potential for growth to small and midsized markets. Given that there is competition in the market for small, medium, and large clients, there was no real way to expand. We were however, doing 501(k) retirement plan administration both on our proprietary system, designed and marketed for large employers, and on a purchased platform for smaller companies. We had interest from existing 501(k) clients to take on administration of their defined benefit plans, and we felt we had lost 401(k) business in the past because we didn't offer total retirement outsourcing, just 501(k). It wasn't possible to charge small employers the kinds of fees necessary to implement their plans on our proprietary system, so our efforts centered on what could be done with the purchased system used for small to midsized 401(k) plans. We quickly determined that the purchased system's defined benefits platform wasn't sophisticated enough from a calculation standpoint to handle most of the complexity of defined benefit plans, so we decided to use a combination of the purchased system with the calculation engine component for the proprietary system. We had a lot of needs analysis conversations with our colleagues in another office who were running the project. Given the multiple platforms involved, processing time was a huge concern. We decided to segment the market and serve only those customers who met a fairly stringent set of requirements. Basically, we built a system to serve clients whose plans were easy to administer. In other words,

1. No Multiplan clients

2. No retirement modeling

3. No coordination of benefits, for example, no combination of 501(k) and defined benefit plans

4. Limited Web interface

So, based on this segmentation, we launched our new product with one of our parent companies (a bank). By the time we had signed our third client, we had already begun to move toward a fairly complex multi plan environment. Our fourth and fifth clients were even more complex. We were over budget and off schedule on everything, and then we started trying to figure out how to do coordination of benefits. We built a system for plans that were easy to administer-but plans that are easy to administer are few and far between in the marketplace, and those that exist aren't typically managed by organizations shopping for benefits vendors.

a) Clarify how you would assess Olive Partners' strategy.

b) Explain the modifications you would make in the future in relation to this case study.

c) Describe the methods you'd use to guarantee that an HRIS fits the majority of your clients' requirements.

d) Discuss why it's important to estimate the advantages of new HRIS abilities before determining the costs.

e) Describe how you might use the HR metrics that will be available after the HRIS is in place to justify the purchase.

Question B1

a) Explain how HRM and HRIS have altered, both in terms of HRM's changing role and the impact of computer technol ogy on human resource management.

b) Explain what is the difference between a primary key and a foreign key?

c) Identify the FIVE (5) different types of HRIS users.

d) Compare and contrast the FIVE (5) different methods of data collection.

e) Discuss the FIVE (5) reasons why communication is so important in managing a technological shift.