Members of our team will be in attendance at most of these: We hope to see you there!

HR Summit 2010

28 – 30 April 2010 at the Crystal Palace, Luna Park, Sydney

Free to attend and spread across two days, delegates will see the very best speakers from Australia”s leading companies, as well as the latest products, services and technologies available from a diverse range of industry specialists.

Learn more at http://sydney.hrsummit.com.au

Higher Education HR Conference 2010

28 – 30 April 2010 at the Sofitel, Brisbane

With the title “2020 Vision” this conference is all about planning the University of the future.

Learn more at http://www.aheia.edu.au/conf_2010

AHRI National Convention 2010

10 – 11 May 2010 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Melbourne

Australia’s biggest event for HR and people managers featuring quality international and local speakers and the latest people management solutions.

Learn more at http://www.convention.ahri.com.au

CeBIT Australia 2010

24 – 26 May 2010 at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour

Not strictly HR, but a must visit for anyone on the cusp of HR and business technology, CeBIT is returning to Sydney in under a month.

Learn more at http://www.cebit.com.au/

Oracle and OrgPlus Public Training 2010

Dates throughout April, May and 2010

Our cost-effective public training sessions are now in full swing for 2010, with our first session in Adelaide kicking off next week.

Learn more about Oracle Discoverer training workshops

Learn more about OrgPlus training workshops

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Today we released the Australian HR Tech Report 2010, the latest primary research into HR systems and technology in Australia, including the uptake and satisfaction with HRIS and HR systems, motivators and roadblocks for improvement.

We’ve conducted this research with the aim of giving a little something back to HR in Australia. Many of our customers helped us by submitting their responses to our HR tech survey – to them a huge a thank you.

The report is 40 pages long with commentary, conclusions and recommendations from Peter Forbes, our co-founder and chief HR technology expert. Analysis is divided by industry category and organisation size (in number of employees) to allow you to benchmark your HR organisation against those with similar requirements.

The report is free to download, and we encourage all of our customers and followers of this blog to help themselves to a free copy and see how they compare with their peers in Australian HR.

Download your free copy of the Australian HR Tech Report 2010.

Have you read the report already?

Let us know what you thought of it in the comments below:

It's rare to be happy with out of the box functionality.

It’s a rare occurrence when an organisation is happy with out of the box HRIS functionality.

During  implementation, it may be that HR/Payroll changed their practices to fit the features of the HRIS. But over the life of a system new information is required to be stored and processes change.  The HRIS will need to be customised to meet these requests.

Knowing the right way to approach customising and extending the functionality of your HRIS is critical as the downstream impacts can be expensive and time consuming.

Most organisations have learnt the perils of customising a core vendor product: expensive modifications that can only be performed by the vendor, re-doing the custom work to roll into the next release, or even worse, stuck on a version of the software unable to upgrade.

Only when there is no other alternative should you consider customising your core HRIS.

Another way of adding site specific features to your HRIS is to leverage off existing structures and create new functionality (screens, reports, transactions) that act as extensions not customisations.  Extensions, when done correctly, leave a lighter change footprint on your HRIS reducing the ongoing cost and effort required to look after more traditional customisations.

Here’s a couple of points to look out for when planning your next HRIS extension:

Look for current HRIS functionality

Are you sure the new feature the HR Director says she needs is not available in the system?  Make sure you read all the documentation you can lay hands on including user guides, release notes, whitepapers.

Talk to people in your user group, and check out any vendor forums.  Talk to other organisations in similar industries – chances are they have come across the same issue and already have developed a solution that you can use.

Leverage off current interfaces and data structures

The complexity of a customisation is impacted by the number of screens, business logic and storage objects required to enter, transact and store for the new piece of functionality. To reduce complexity, look at existing tables and functionality to find ways to hook off core functionality.

Examples:

• storing affiliates or contractor information in the employee and job tables creating new codes to distinguish them from salaried employees
• using the survey functionality in Employee Self Service to accommodate performance reviews of employees
• using flex/custom fields to store additional information rather then creating a new table – most HRIS have this functionality

Be sure to consider data volumes and the impact of storing your data in these existing structures as the system grows.

Planning HRIS customisations

Avoid hardcoding – Use codes and config data to keep the HRIS flexible

There seems to be a school of thought that because you’re developing a customisation it’s OK to hardcode that department or employee status code into your program.  Not only is this lazy design, but it prevents business users from having any configuration or control over the customisation.

Keep your customisation flexible and future proof by driving key features – employee applicability, department scope, trigger conditions etc – by leveraging off system codes and setup configuration (example/ codes, CON_DEF’s and code rules in the Alesco HRIS).

Create a framework for building and managing HRIS extensions

Consistent packaging and managing of customisations prevent common issues like moving between non-production and production, identifying customisations and re-applying patches for new releases of the software.

Use consistent naming scheme for your tables, views, screens and reports.  Consider using a prefix like your company name on your new objects.  Has the HRIS vendor provided a developer pack or customisation guidelines? Make sure you follow them.

Maintain a register of customisations and extensions listing the modules/programs affected and why it was developed.  The register comes in handy during upgrades to determine what impact your customisations have against the latest release and whether you still need it.

As organisations recognise the benefits in having the HRIS as the single source of record for employee data using Self Service as the delivery platform, it makes sense organisations will want to extend the capabilities of the HRIS.

Vendors are recognising the need for customers to extend the system and I think we will soon see an explosion of more frameworks, API’s, web services, business rule frameworks that allow more extensibility in HRIS – without the headaches and disadvantages of traditional customisations.

The Australian HR Tech Report 2010.

 
With the interest of shedding more light on the state of HR technology in Australia, Navigo are proud to commission the Australian HR Tech Report 2010. What is it?

• The latest, most comprehensive study on HR technology solutions in Australia
• An analysis of Australian companies with 500 employees and above
• A 5 minute phone survey to collect great HR intelligence
• To be distributed freely to hundreds of HR professionals around Australia
• Commencing 1st November 2009 to be completed 31st December 2009.

The result will be a report with unique intelligence on HR technology, that will allow you to benchmark against other organisations of your employee size, in your state. The focus will be on a variety of HR tech solutions, including the main drivers for, and roadblocks against solution improvement.

Anyone who contributes to making the report a reality – through a simple contribution to the survey – will receive the finished Australian HR Tech Report 2010 for free.

To learn more about the report, or sign up to be on the call list and receive a copy of the report for free, visit htrechreport.com.au

Paulus and myself will be attending and I’m looking forward to attending the sessions and checking out the exhibitors.

In particular I look forward to the keynote presentation by Don Tapscott “Human Resources 2.0: How the New Web and the Net Generation Are Transforming Talent, Management” and “The Enterprise and the Talent Management shootout” which involves two large vendors, SAP and Lawson, and two small vendors, Salary.com and Plateau, demonstrating their features. I also look forward to roaming amongst the exhibitors to get a first hand look and demonstration of latest software offerings.

When we arrive home we’ll be bringing back all the latest ideas and best-practices in HR technology: We look forward to sharing these around Australia!

Instant Client also comes with a command line SQL*Plus utility.

Instant Client was released in Oracle 10g but can be used to connect to older Oracle databases to 8.1.7. Instant Client is a free, production ready Oracle tool.

Download Instant Client

Instant Client can be downloaded free from Oracle’s OTN website, you’ll need the:

• Instant Client Package – Basic (32mb)
• Instant Client Package – ODBC (700k)
• Instant Client Package – SQL*Plus (260k) (if you want to use SQL*Plus)

These files come in a winzip format.

Installing Instant Client

Extract the zip file to a directory where you want the Instant Client program to live (say C:\Program Files\Instant Client).

Run the file odbc_install.bat – this updates some registry settings for the ODBC install

Update your PATH environment variable to include the Instant Client directory.

To do this, go to Control Panel, System and click on the Advanced tab.

Click on the Environment variables button and edit the ‘Path’ variable to add the Instant Client directory path (C:\Program Files\Instant Client). Make sure you don’t mess up your other settings in the Path.

The Oracle ODBC drivers have now been installed! Easy.

Set up a tnsnames.ora (optional)

The tnsnames.ora file is a config file used by Oracle software that specifies the connection details of the databases you want to connect to.

If you don’t use a tnsnames.ora file, you’ll need to specify the connection details (server name, port number, database name) every time you connect to the database instead of just specifying the alias name.

To create a tnsnames.ora file create a text file and add:

alien =
  (DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS_LIST =
        (ADDRESS =
          (COMMUNITY = tcp.world)
          (PROTOCOL = TCP)
          (Host = 192.168.0.100)
          (Port = 1521)
        )
    )
    (CONNECT_DATA = (SID = alien)
    )
  )

Place this file in the Instant Client directory.

Now add a new environment variable TNS_ADMIN (like the Path variable) to tell Instant Client where to look for the file.

Note: If you already have other Oracle software installed on your PC, chances are you have a tnsnames.ora. To use that file add a new environment variable TNS_ADMIN and point this to the location of your existing tnsnames.ora

Configure the ODBC connection

Set up the ODBC connection by going to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Data Sources (ODBC). Click on the System DSN tab and click Add.

Note: If you only want your Windows login user to see the data source, use the User DSN tab.

If prompted for a driver to use, select the ‘Oracle in instantclient’.

Enter a name and description for the data source, if you are using a tnsnames.ora file the database alias should be available in the TNS Service Name drop down list. Otherwise leave this field blank.

Leave the other settings to default unless required, although if you’re only viewing data it may be wise to check the “Read-Only Connection” checkbox.

Test the Connection

On the ODBC Driver Configuration page (shown above), click the ‘Test Connection’ button. This will bring up the connection screen.

If your TNSNAMES.ora has been set up simply enter your details:

Service name: database alias name
Enter user-name: username
Enter password: password

If you haven’t set up your TNSNAMES.ora the service name will be in the format: servername:port/sid

Where server name is the ip or name of the server running the Oracle database, port is the port number the Oracle listener is running on and sid is the sid name of the database.

For example 192.168.0.50:1521/mydb

If all is good you should get the ‘Test Sucessful’ message returned to you.

Trouble Shooting

System error code 998 – malformed or spaces in the PATH env variable

For more configuration help see the Instant Client Forums.

Connecting to SQL*Plus

To run SQL*Plus, go to the directory where Instant Client Package – SQL*Plus was unzipped and run the application sqlplus.exe. This will bring up the following screen where you will connect to the database.

Organisations face increasing demand to automate complex business processes that span multiple back office systems and can adapt to change. Historically deploying complex workflows was tough – developing interfaces, customising the application, and developing software to schedule and monitor the process. If the process changed, this required more effort…

Fortunately Oracle has solutions for integrating applications to manage complex processes.

Talent2′s Alesco HRIS provides an inbuilt workflow solution to cater for the common business transaction process flow. Customers often require tailored process solutions that suit their individual business requirements. The use of additional Workflow products allow customers to tailor the Workflow process without the need for customizations.

This white paper looks at the two major business process management tools from Oracle and how they can be used with Alesco’s Web Kiosk.

A major feature of Open World was the latest database release, 10g, with features including Grid computing (the g in 10g). Grid computing is basically clusters of cheap servers acting as one virtual server sharing disk space. This reduces the single point of failure and also allows the application to be easily scaled in terms of CPU and memory. Other nice features in 10g is the self managing and tuning of the database, aimed at making it easier to administer and troubleshoot – watchout DBA’s.

A strong message given at Open World was Oracle’s support and encouragement for running the Linux operating system on Intel hardware, a combination referred to as Lintel. Oracle develops on and runs the majority of their internal apps on Lintel and is talking up the combination for clients. Dell has also started selling servers bundled with Red Hat Linux and Oracle 10g at very low prices.

Within the Alesco community there is already a number of sites successfully running Linux, a supported platform on the e807 version of Alesco.

If you’re thinking of moving to Linux for your Alesco install, here’s a couple of reasons why you should:

Lower TCO for existing UNIX sites

Those sites with proprietary UNIX environments (HP, AIX, Solaris) should be able to lower their TCO with a move to Linux and Intel. Existing staff skilled in UNIX require minimal training to move to Linux. Custom programs and tools that have been written should migrate with no effort. It’s a fair bet that most UNIX techs have already experienced Linux and have installed it on a server somewhere in your organisation!

Replicating your production instance for testing and development environments can also be achieved using nothing more than desktop PC’s running Linux.

More bang for your buck

The experiences Navigo has had running Alesco on Linux and Intel all point to quicker report processing times. Previously Intel had been disadvantaged by the 32 bit architecture, meaning SGA’s for database could not grow beyond 4gb. Now with the release of 64 bit architecture, Intel can now compete with the proprietary UNIX servers.

At the recent benchmark for the PNG Government, we processed 66,000 employees in under 3 hours. This was on a cluster of two 4CPU Intel Itanium Servers with 64 bit Red Hat Linux with a 7GB SGA. The payrun was split into 8 streams using the standard Alesco functionality which balanced nicely across the CPU’s.

With a cluster of Intel servers being considerably cheaper, sometimes one-tenth that of proprietary UNIX vendors, the cost savings to organisations are substantial.

Simplify the support process

Different flavours of UNIX, multiple versions of the OS, multiple versions of Oracle. Most sites have probably experienced certification problems and Oracle/Alesco bugs that only appear in their version/flavour of UNIX. Sometimes even trying to get a copy of the Oracle software for that version is a nightmare.

Running Linux, sites benefit from strong Oracle support for Linux issues and the availability of Oracle software on the OTN website.

For the Alesco application, more sites running the one operating system allows for quicker identification and resolution of Alesco/Oracle issues and simplifies the compatibility problems.

Come upgrade time, Alesco sites also benefit from the testing that more pro-active sites have already performed on the latest Alesco/Oracle combination.

For most organisations the challenge is reduce IT costs and deliver “unbreakable” systems. Running Alesco on a Lintel platform is certainly a step in the right direction.

For more info about Oracle on Linux see Oracle’s Linux FAQ