System maintenance

Introduction
 The ongoing task of operating and maintaining the new system is often
forgotten
 Organizations must determine who will be responsible for the ongoing
maintenance of the system – system upgrading and updating, adjusting
to legislative changes and changes in organizational procedures
 In smaller organization, HR professionals take on HRIS responsibilities
along with their other task
 Larger organization will have one or more dedicated professionals to
manage the system
 What is maintenance?
 Refers primarily to software maintenance rather than hardware
maintenance

 It includes:
 Technical changes that do not alter HRIS functions and features
 Correcting bugs in programs or data
 Altering data definitions (field sizes, types, and codes)
 Modifying a system already in production
 Fine-tuning a system so that it will run faster
 Major enhancements such as the addition on new modules
 Definition

Maintenance refers to
any changes made to the
HRIS after the system
becomes operational and
has been accepted.
Types of maintenance

Corrective

Adaptive Perfective
 Corrective maintenance
 often occurs early in the HRIS life cycle
 Fixing problems that prevent the system from working the way the
designers and users intended it to work
 Some of the problems that lead to this kind of problem are
 incorrect design (for example bugs that occur from an improper or
incomplete requirements definition),
 development (for example poor coding), or
 implementation
 Adaptive maintenance
 Done when there are changes in technology, government regulations, or
other external forces, such as new system releases from the vendor.

 Some examples of adaptive maintenance include

 increasing the size of identity card field from eight to fourteen
characters, and
 changing the percentage in the calculation of the Employee Pension
Fund calculation.
 Perfective maintenance
 at optimizing the performance of the system.
 It is done when there is a request from the users and technicians.
 may not be as important as corrective or adaptive maintenance, but it
can enhance the capability of an HRIS.
 it is mostly carried out during the growing stage of an HRIS life cycle.
 In a mature system, perfective maintenance occurs because the users
become more expert with the system, that HRSC integrate new tools and
techniques into HRIS work.
 When Maintenance is Required?

 Service Requests
 when the system did not function well at all or it fails to meet
standards completely, OR
 the system works so well that the users see new avenues for
improvement
 User Surveys
 surveys should be conducted in order to find out the current level of
HRIS performance.
 HRIS issues, strengths, and weakness,
 user satisfaction with HRIS and HRSC, and
 changing human resource needs.
 Continue…
 Business and Government Changes
 To remain competitive, businesses must be able to adapt to the
changes that are happening all around it, especially if the change is
instigated by the government. Adapting to these changes means that
the business itself has to undergo some kind of change. As a result,
the IS system used also have to change, including the HRIS.

 New Developments in the HRIS Field

 The information technology evolves very rapidly. The HRIS
manager should always keep up to date on the latest development of
HRIS-related products, services and project-management
techniques.
 When Maintenance is not Enough

 One reason a system needs to be replace is because the performance of

the system has declined.
 Systems declines due to several reasons, mainly:
 business needs evolve,
 new technology emerges,
 the system has experienced a certain level of change from its
original form,
 the system is more of a encumbrance rather than a service.
How does one knows a systems needs to be
replaced?

 There are many tools that HRSC managers can use to get this kind of
information.
 For example, audits, logs, and user and consultant evaluations.
 Information from these sources can be used to compare the performance
of the system to a predetermined standard.
 Other than that, some of the things that one can watch for are:
 maintenance resources – both time and money – have been increasing,
 maintenance request increase in number,
 maintenance activities no longer provides dramatic productivity
improvements
 Several possible replacement strategies
(Ceriello &Freeman 1991)
 do not replace; let the HRIS collapse,
 replace modules as they reach decline,
 replace the entire system once it reaches decline,
 replace parts of the system as cost-benefits-value analysis
indicates,
 replace the entire system as cost-benefit-value analysis indicates,
 replace the system before decline begins, but diagnose the
problems early
The end