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Part - II
HRIS
HRIS stands for Human Resources Information Systems. It involves automating the human resources management system of an organization. Just as any other functional division in an organization, the HR department also generates a lot of data everyday. These data arise out of various transactions that take place such as punching in/out for work timings, absenteeism, leave applications, payment, and application processing among other things. All these generate data which needs to be captured, stored and analyzed for various reasons. For example, it might be necessary to compare the number of hours put in by a certain section of employees over a month in order to calculate the productivity. With the passage of time, such data grow in magnitude and as such it becomes very difficult and time consuming to manually maintain a log of such data. Also, it is a tedious task to analyze these data manually to draw any useful information from them. An HRIS system, that is appropriately conceived, implemented and administered, can take care of such problems and provide meaning to the data to facilitate better decision making by the HR personnel.
Stages in Software Development:
Software development process normally passes through certain identifiable stages before the ultimate product is ready for deployment. These stages are discussed in brief here.
Feasibility Study:
Requirements Analysis: In this stage, the existing system is studied and analyzed, and the requirements of the proposed system are understood. A document called the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) is prepared which writes down in concrete terms what the new system has to provide.
Design: In the design phase, a plan for the development of the software is prepared. The design phase can be broken down into two categories:
Top Level Design: In this phase, the modules that will be used to build the software are determined along with their specifications and their interdependencies and intercommunications.
Detailed Design: In this stage, the internal logic for the individual modules is developed.
Choice of server language etc.
Coding: In this phase, the design is translated to programs written in one or more programming languages.
Testing: In this phase, the product developed so far, is tested for any error that might have resulted in the previous stages. Three types of testing are normally done.
Unit Testing: Each program is tested across all possible control-routes to check for errors.
Module testing: The various modules are tested to check for their interdependencies.
Systems testing/Integration Testing: In this phase, the entire system is tested including the software, hardware and other elements of the environment.
Maintenance: Maintenance is normally of three types:
Adaptive:
Preventive:
Corrective
Although an HRIS implementation also follows the above stages, there are certain other aspects to designing and implementing an HRIS system (or for that matter any ERP system). While a normal software development project would follow the above stages, for the Indian software vendors, a project on an ERP implementation would follow a different route. This is because of the existence of big players in the market who develop their own ERP products.
Thus from the perspective of an IT firm, a normal software project development is different from a project for implementing an HRIS or any other ERP solution. This is because, most of the times an HRIS implementation would require of them to customize an HRIS package that has been bought by the client. The next section discusses how the markets for HRIS products and projects are different from those for a normal software project undertaken by the IT companies.
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* Contributed by -
Rupam Das,
The Media Cell.
XIM Bhubaneswar.
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