Keeping your HR Systems current when budgets are tight.

The rapid evolution and adoption of on-demand computing came about because companies no longer have to plan and support costly application upgrades. In the SaaS delivery model, the provider of the software takes care of this for you. Yet, there are plenty of HR Systems in use out there that are on premise today. Given that budgets are tight, I was interested in learning about the upgrade strategies that people are deploying for their on premise HR Systems.

There are 2 reasons to upgrade your application, to maintain a version of the software that is current and supported by your vendor, and to take advantage of new functionality that extends the use of the application and potentially eliminates the need for an existing customization or process work around.

Rich Berger, HRIS Director at Citrix and member of the IHRIM Board of Directors notes that upgrade projects whose purpose are to maintain a currently supported version are important "you will need to do this if the vendor will no longer support the existing code base you are on or take a gamble at being unsupported."

These are the type of upgrades that over 70% of people I polled are undertaking this year. Once you are on an unsupported release, it is a much larger and more expensive undertaking to get up to a supported release level. Thus, technically keeping your applications current is in the long run a very cost conscious means to manage your existing applications.
However, there are projects underway where the upgrades are taking advantage of new functionality. In these projects often times one can eliminate customizations or manual workarounds by implementing application functionality that was not available in the previous release.

Mario Ellis, Director of Compensation and HRIS at University of Chicago Medical Center believes in performing upgrades for improved functionality where there is business benefit " We did not want to stop implementing business rich features, but we were wise in which to roll out. . .For UCMC we found that basic processes that kept the end-users going into the application gave the best results such as employee self service for demographic changes, and manager self-service for personnel actions.”

As long a you own the software application, support and maintain it with internal resources, you are going to need to plan for the upgrading of the software. Even when budgets are tight, you must plan for routine support and maintenance of these applications. If you plan well, you may be able to get added benefits from new functionality.