A. Background.......................................................................................................... 2

B. OBJECTIVES OF HRMS INITIATIVE..................................................................... 3

C. OVERVIEW OF THE CURRENT HRMS SYSTEM in ORISSA......................... 9

D. KEY ISSUES WITH CURRENT SYSTEM........................................................... 12

E. KEY CHALLENGES IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF HRMS.......................... 15

F. SOLUTION DEFINITION (Illustrative purposes only)..................... 17

G.OVERVIEW OF FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS OF THE HRMS SOLUTION........... 18

H. Functional View of the HRMS Solution (for Illustrative purposes only):        20

I. INDICATIVE SCOPE OF WORK FOR THE PROJECT ………………… 22

 

 

A. BACKGROUND

The Department for International Development, UK (DFID), in its endeavor to encourage public sector reforms, with specific reference to Orissa, has initiated several projects across the State. The DFID and the GoO desire to successfully leverage the use of information technology as an enabling tool to provide efficient and effective governance that is responsive to the needs of its employees and citizens.

Recognizing the need for streamlining and computerizing the backbone function of the Government, viz., Treasury and Accounts, which binds all the Departments and also interface with external entities such as Banks, AG’s office etc, the DFID, in association with the Government of Orissa, has initiated computerisation of Treasuries function within GoO. As a logical extension of this Programme, GoO now seeks the support of DFID in modernisation of Human Resource Management System (HRMS), with necessary interfaces with the ongoing computerisation project in Treasuries, with a view to improve overall efficiency and effectiveness of public service delivery.                                        Top

B. OBJECTIVES OF HRMS INITIATIVE

The Government of Orissa have identified human resource management function as a common thread that binds all the Departments. At present, the GoO has about 4.70 lakh employees on its rolls. The Government recognizes the need for an information technology solution to address the needs and streamline its complex and dispersed Human Resource Management System. The problems in the personnel system have negative repercussions upon the activities of the rest of the organization. Mismanagement of the personnel system imposes a serious burden and distracts the energy of the leadership from core departmental activities to solving grievances of the employees. It also causes distortion in the personnel structure as delays occur in recruitment and promotion and vacancies remain unfilled for a considerable period of time. Delays also occur in sanction of pensions that cause grave hardship. The Administration often gets involved in solving employee grievances and substantial manpower efforts are diverted to these issues. In addition, there are over 50,000 pending litigation cases which take away crucial senior officials’ time and attention.  All these problems require an immediate remedy. Given the size of the personnel in the State Government and the complexities of the problems related to personnel, the modernization of the Human Resources Management System will be a major enabler for an efficient, effective and citizen-centric administration.

GoO have identified Human Resource Management System (HRMS) as one of the core initiatives as a part of its ongoing modernizing initiatives and e-governance plans, eventually culminating into a Government to Employee (G2E) portal. An Employee Life Cycle Approach will be adopted while capturing the employee data in a dynamic real-time basis through the proposed system right from the stage of the recruitment of the employee to the stage of her retirement (in fact, even for post-retirement pension related issues) all the relevant facts in connection with the employee will be recorded in the proposed database.This is a project aimed at modernization of the human resource management system that may facilitate creation of an optimal personnel regime which simultaneously, satisfies the employees, and furnishes the necessary means for the fulfilment of broader organizational goals.The optimal personal strength would in turn lead to reduction in the salary cost of the GoO. This would make the system leaner and efficient and in turn would help in better management of finances of the state. The resources which would be freed can be deployed into programs which would have a wider social impact for the state as a whole.The outcome of the same shall be more time for the senior officials as well as employees to devote to relevant development work and operation issues thereby serving the citizens better, particularly the weaker sections. It will cover all the offices including the Departments, Heads of Departments, other subordinate Field offices.

 

The key objectives of the HRMS initiative include:

·       Development of an integrated view of employee information across all departments of GoO.

·       Provision of timely & reliable management information relating to human resources for effective decision making within the government. .

·       Provision of ‘single window’ services to employees.

·       Provision of user-friendly operating environment (to the employee), where in, the HRMS system is accessible by a majority of the employees, over a browser.

·       Complete Personnel information to be available on-line, in order to eliminate delays in decision making

·       All personnel rules to be on the Web with query system

·       All forms to be on the web

·       In the end, to achieve a more efficient and effective workforce to serve the citizens of the State, particularly the poor.

GoO strongly believes that the development of a HRMS System will increase the value proposition of the service that it provides to its employees. The key points in which, it feels that the value proposition will increase are summarized in the diagram below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It may also be noted that one of the anticipated gains from this initiative includes improvements in acceptance of e-governance activities (of the government) by the State Government employees.                      Top

C. OVERVIEW OF THE CURRENT HRMS SYSTEMS in ORISSA

Currently there is no comprehensive Human Resource Management System application in use in any of the Departments of the Government of Orissa.  An effort has been made by Orissa Primary Education Programme Authority to develop a database of around 15,000 teachers of primary schools in six education districts on a pilot basis. OCAC has developed payroll software, which aims to meet the requirements of the Secretariat. OCAC's "Betan" payroll software is being used in 314 blocks for preparing paybills of block staff as well as school teachers drawing pay from blocks. Approximately, 70,000 members of the staff are drawing their salary through this payroll already. There are also a few other payrolls in some organizations.

Largely HRMS function is carried out manually as of now.  There is no centralized database of the employees of the State that may be shared and be amenable to concurrent applications. For deriving relevant information by different users. The employee data that exist are not organized. They lie scattered in various files in different departments that is not easy to share and suffer from inconsistency and redundancy. There is no regular method of inputting or updating the data that maximizes storage efficiency, promotes data integrity, or facilitates data scalability. The entire system of present data management is ad hoc, without coordination, and does not admit of concurrent access to data by multiple users. There also does not exist any foolproof data security mechanisms. There are no uniform back-up and recovery methods. As a result the present system of management of human resources suffers from lack of standardisation and sharing delay in updating, and relatively in ineffective in deployment of human resources with equity and efficiency across departments and field organisations.

The overall profile of the employees of GoO is summarized as below*:

 

*As on March, 2004

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D. KEY ISSUES WITH CURRENT SYSTEM

There are a number of bottlenecks in the current system, some of which are highlighted below:

•         Lack of up to date information on employees and pensioners 

•         Delays in disposal of personnel cases

–       Pensions not sanctioned in time

–       Incomplete Annual Confidential Reports(ACRs)

–       Departmental Proceedings pending for a long time

–       Promotion

•         ad hoc promotions, not confirmed by Orissa Public Service Commission (OPSC)

•         Promotions not effected in time

–       Gradation list not final, etc.

•         Accumulation of personnel grievances

•         Rising Number of litigations and waste of senior official’s time attending to these.

•         Lack of effective deployment of human resources for public service delivery

•         Personnel matters not exclusively assigned to Officers

•         No executive Sheet of employees – service history

The Government of Orissa strongly believes that for all round development of the State and for the achievement of its stated objectives, there is an urgent need for the development of an integrated, centralized information technology solution relating to HR function, as all Departments under the GoO have these two functions as part of their administration.

It is notable that in the absence of an organized database of employees, the decision making becomes slow as retrieval of accurate and relevant information is not easy. Even monitoring of employees work performance suffers. Large scale absenteeism in rural and remote areas is being observed. The accurate requirement for placement of personnel is often not available. This causes inequities in placement of personnel. The redeployment of surplus employees to Departments that require additional manpower becomes difficult. The monitoring of the activities of the large number of field workers such as school teachers, anganwadi workers, health workers, which is so important for proper delivery of key public services, becomes cumbersome. Thus without an organized employee database many citizen-centric initiatives of the Government do not bring the desired results. It is therefore imperative that as an important measure of personnel reforms the State Government develops and applies the database as contemplated under the Human Resources Management System. It will serve as an important decision support system and facilitate work and information flow efficiently. It will also enable application of more refined techniques of forecasting and enable proactive decision making. 

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E. KEY CHALLENGES IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF HRMS

Some of the key challenges that the GoO is likely to face in its implementation of the HRMS solution would include the following:

·       Solution Definition / e-governance roadmap for the pilot and roll-out phases is yet to be defined

·       Functional specifications for HRMS are yet to be finalized.

·       There is no unique employee number at Government level.

·       Process standardization with a view to identifying and eliminating operational inefficiencies needs to be agreed upon.

·       Change in law requirements need to be identified , based on the Process Standardisation / To Be process and FRS

·       Modalities for sharing of common information such as Employee ID etc. need to be addressed

·       Data cleansing and migration, particularly with respect Service Registers is of one of the biggest challenges of the project.

·       Technology issues (architecture, standards, etc) need to be considered beyond the pilot phase; Wide-Area Network and the availability, reliability aspects need to be addressed from a holistic / state-wide needs perspective

·       Communication strategy needs to be developed to obtain the buy-in from the stakeholders.

As an important first step, GoO has already appointed a dedicated Nodal Officer for the HRMS initiative within the General Administration Department. 

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F. SOLUTION DEFINITION (Illustrative purposes only)

The proposed architecture for a likely HRMS Application could be as shown below:

 

As seen from the above figure, the application is envisaged to be web-based, to be hosted at a central location, with thin client at the front-end. Needless to say, the dependence on robust, reliable (with adequate redundancies) network is an important element of this approach, the requirements of which, need to be viewed from a State-wide perspective, particularly focusing on the G2C priorities of the government.

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G. OVERVIEW OF FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS OF THE HRMS SOLUTION

The application should have the capability to:

·       Provide support for Multi Department functionality

·       Be browser based

·       Be integrated.

·       Be available to all users of HRMS system. Provision of access should be based on the individual’s job function/ roles

·       Be fully Workflow enabled to reduce paper work

·       Be able to extract any information (report, graph, data) and to export it to outside systems in the form of MS document or flat file

·       Be query-based and alert-based.

·       Enable forecasting.

·       Interface with the Data-warehousing systems for information exchange

·       Interface with Electronic Document Management systems to maintain employee related documents. For example (employee records, security documents etc.).

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H. Functional View of the HRMS Solution (for Illustrative purposes only):

The key modules of the proposed HRMS system (to be implemented in a phased manner) are likely to be as shown below: 

Some of the key Functional Requirements envisaged for the Employee Self-Service Module are as follows: 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I. INDICATIVE SCOPE OF WORK FOR THE PROJECT

Scoping Study, Solution Definition	Design of e-Governance Roadmap for implementation of HRMS and the approach to implementation, taking into consideration other IT initiatives being taken up by the government of Orissa
Functional & Systems Study	Study of existing systems & procedures, functional requirements, business processes etc. Study at  Departments and Treasuries & Finance department
Design	Design of application software, database structures, security architecture and interfaces
Security Architecture	Design of Security Architecture, preparation & implementation of Security Administration plan
Development	Development of application software (HRMS, Employee Self Service & Learning Management System)
Implementation	Deployment of solution at selected (Pilot & Rollout) locations
Maintenance	Maintenance of the solution in terms of changes to functionality on account of changes in Statutes, Rules etc., for a period of 3 years from Go-live date
Operational Support	Support for overall system stabilization, application maintenance, system administration, database administration & end user problem resolution for a period of 3 years from Go-live date
Warranty	Comprehensive Warranty period for a duration of 36 months from Go-live date
Data Migration	Data migration Strategy, Preparation of data and uploading from manual / legacy systems
Comprehensive Training	Provide Technical and end-user training
Documentation	Preparation of documents including Functional Requirements document, Systems Requirement specifications, Detailed Design, User manuals, Operational manual, Maintenance Manuals etc.
Infrastructure requirements study	Study of existing infrastructure (H/w & Networks) and recommendations for ‘to-be’ requirements for successful implementation of HRMS solution
Programme Management support till Go-Live of Stage II	Technical Consultancy support during the implementation of the project through Stage I & II respectively

 

 

 

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