What is wise? Building Custom HR Case Application or leveraging ServiceNow HR Case and Knowledge Management to transform Employee Service Management?

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Of late I’ve been analysing multiple implementations where customers have developed Custom HR Case Management application using ServiceNow Platform to manage the Service Delivery for Employees and HR engagements. In most of the cases, customers are successful building such applications by investing time, efforts, and money and have added the bells and whistles to cater the need of the hour. However, the common concerns they highlight is the craving appetite these applications develop to eat up large portion of their Corporate Cost Center. They find it very hard to keep them up to date, keep them secure and complaint, integrate them with other 3rd party or BOT applications,?enhance them to next level, generate reports and analytics for them, and many more. Also, since they are very focused on developing and feeding these applications, they, somehow, have deviated from the actual Digital Transformation journey for Employee Service Management.

The main reason behind these challenges is HR and Employee Experience space. This space is continuously evolving and on the path of revolution for quite a while. Organizations are finding it very hard to attract, engage, train, and retain their talent, and these challenges are multiplied with each passing day. On employee side, their expectations have totally changed. Gone are those days where employees could wait for a week or so to get a response/solution on their issues. They want to have consumerized experience with full transparency and engaging conversations. On the other axis, HRs want to focus on strategic decisions to bring scale to the organization. They want to have a filter to transfer the repetitive and mundane tasks to the operations team and bring only those to their attention which actually needs their involvement. This brings continuous change in the requirements and the backlog for the custom applications piling up with more and more features.??

Since the changes in the requirement are persistent, implementation team sets themselves on building a scalable, secure, robust, and reliable custom applications. They get so engrossed in building these applications that their focus and priority become defining a data model, securing the data and processes from unwanted access, learning the compliance and data privacy acts, building new UIs, defining new workflows or integrations, and many of the other IT work. This makes them to lose focus on simplifying and standardising HR processes, automate End-to-End Processes, enable HR to deliver higher-value tasks, and providing a better engagement and experience to employees, which was the sole reason to commence the Digital Transformation journey. Does it make sense to start the arduous journey to build a DT application rather than focusing on providing better experience and engagement for the employees?

In my opinion, most of these challenges can be obviated if customers leverage the standard ServiceNow HR Case and Knowledge Management product offering. This will help customer to transfer the burden of developing the application to the product organizations and keep themselves invested on focusing what they really want to achieve with the Digital Transformation. Product organizations have the right manpower and skills to build such applications with scale. They invest humongous efforts in gathering the requirements from all segments of the industries. They take plenty of time to discuss, debate and analyse the requirements and pick up the ones which really matter to provide better employee engagements. They go for full software development life-cycle to design, build, test, and release the product. They put lot of effort in not to leave any stone unturned to make their product better, safer, and scalable as this is their job to do to sustain in their business.??

Below are some of the key features of ServiceNow HR Case and Knowledge Management product which are hard to challenge by Custom Application:

A well defined CoE model: HR Cases, being sensitive in nature, should assign only to the specific agent whose nature of job is aligned with the case category and the well defined boundaries for each of the CoE helps in achieving this. This refrains the risk to assign sensitive cases related to employee welfare, DEI, disciplinary actions, get assigned to Recruiter, Payroll, Time Tracker, or Workforce Administrator who have nothing to do with them. This further helps in achieving the primary objective of HR Service Management, that is to have HR cases assigned to right agent, quickly for faster resolution.

Predefined Standard Workflows and Catalogs for HR Services: Many Catalogs come with the blueprint of standard workflow definitions and Record Producers which really highlight how the business process is defined across industries and they also help in expediting the implementation.

Robust Roles and ACLs: In-built HR specific Roles and ACLs obviate the risk of data leaks and breaches in compliance. This keeps the cases and information confined in the walls of HR and even System Admin don’t have access to see what’s going on in HR world. These ACLs also help in segregating the roles and responsibilities of each of the agent supporting in service delivery.

End-to-End HR Case Management: An HR case goes through several stages in its life cycle. It starts with case creation, then development and execution, then transfer or escalation or resume or resubmit if required, and finally closure or suspend. And, all these stages are well supported by the standard product.

Knowledge Management, the key to make employees self sufficient: Easily maintainable and searchable knowledge base is a pivotal asset for any Service Management system, and the HR knowledge management does check all the boxes here. Knowledge contributors create and maintain the articles for policies, process or any relevant information with ease and employees can access them as and when they need.

HR Service Portal, an easy to use Self-Service Portal for Employees: HR Service Portal is a self-service gateway for employees to get information on any of the daily basis need and fetch help from the HR team. They can view top rated knowledge base articles, view their own HR Profile, their cases, and submit any query.? This portal can be configured based on organization needs.

A complete HR Profile for Employees: No need to navigate to other applications to fetch common employee information. Instead use HR Profile to store such information securely. HR Agents can access it to resolve the cases quickly. Data could be pumped into HR Profile through various integration ways.

A complete suite for Employee Engagement and Experience: Multiple supporting Applications like: Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions, Employee Center Pro, Performance Analytics for HR, Virtual Agent for HR, Employee Journey Management, Learning Core, Listening Posts, Predictive Intelligence, HR Reporting and Dashboards and many more, when combined with Case & Knowledge Management delivers end-to-end engaging experience to the employees.

Choice is always yours!

Special thanks to Satyanarayana Mallireddy Sonam Arora Jaydeep Deb for sharing their thoughts on this topic.

References: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/vancouver-employee-service-management/page/product/human-resources/concept/hr-service-delivery.html

I hope you find this article helpful while designing the HR Service Management and defining the right KPIs for the Digital Transformation journey. If you have any suggestions or like to add your experience, please share them.