Automating business rules to simplify HR management
IBM empowers their HR leaders to make data-informed decisions about collaborators when it uses IBM Operational Decision Manager on Cloud to develop the IBM Cognitive Talent Alerts solution.
Business challenge
IBM Corp. needed a way to scale an email talent alert system to an enterprise-level Manager Hub, where the HR leaders would be empowered to manage the rules behind the alerts.
For IBM Corp., its employees are its most valuable resource. The company asks that managers assess and take measures to develop their collaborators. However, managers often don’t have the right tools, information and insight to make suitable recommendations.
At the onset of the project, a team operating under the management of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) HR department and IBM Software Group had deployed an on-premise application that was used by a single business unit to send email alerts to managers when their collaborators required more attention. The goal of the application was to yield recommendations for career growth and interests and even assess the potential flight risk of valuable collaborators.
All of the decisions about what situations required an alert were hard-coded, which meant that HR leaders were required to contact IT whenever they wanted to change a criteria in their decisions.
The application sent mail alerts to managers when a decision was triggered, and these alerts would add to the managers' daily flow of emails. These emails were considered to be the source of truth, as the trace of how decisions were taken.
With the ambition to scale this solution to the whole enterprise, while improving the managers' experience and empowering HR leaders to manage talent decisions, the IBM CIO team initiated a project to develop a cognitive HR platform hosted on the Cloud, named Cognitive Talent Alerts.
Transformation
The IBM CIO team developed an enterprise-scale Cloud application, available online and on mobile devices, based on the IBM Cloud platform and IBM Mobile Foundation. And to let HR leaders manage nimble updates to the decisions behind the recommendations given in the application, they used Operational Decision Manager on Cloud.
The IBM CIO team changed their development process to a continuous delivery mode, and set up the Cloud services infrastructure for the Manager Hub. At the same time, they looked into ways of making the decision-making process more flexible, and less dependent on IT. The rules for what talent action to take, based on data from systems of records - such as skills, performance, or compensation - had to be put directly into the HR leaders' hands.
The ODM on Cloud pricing model corresponded to the IBM CIO team's ambitions to scale the application to the enterprise level. Indeed, a price per usage would have made the cost grow exponentially, while the capped price of ODM on Cloud ensured sustainable scaling.
Before moving to the Cloud, there was always a risk of downtime when IT deployed a new version. And because the rules were hard-coded into the application, any change to the rules meant a new deployment. With ODM on Cloud, the rules are managed separately and can be updated independently from the Cloud application. With the combination of the IBM Cloud platform and ODM on Cloud, updates to the decision logic are nimble.
While data analytics solutions can aggregate data into a consolidated view, they rarely enable managers to actually make decisions based on the data. Business rules make it possible to formalize those decisions and to manage them independently from the data source, keeping that data secure. Automated decisions reduce the cognitive burden for a manager to synthesize data from many data sources and then evaluate which actions to take.
In each department in the company, HR leaders design the rules, and it's easier and faster for them because they are familiar with the logic.
With a Cloud-based application and ODM on Cloud, the decisions can run automatically. Instead of sending alerts that are static, the recommendations on the Manager Hub go away when the conditions of the business rules stop being true. So when managers access the Hub, they see the most up-to-date recommendations. Managers can then focus on regular conversations with their employees to review the recommendations from the Cognitive Talent Alerts solution.
ODM on Cloud changed the relationship and the distribution of responsibilities between HR leaders and IT. HR leaders could focus on the business logic and making the best choices for their collaborators, while IT could focus on developing the Manager Hub, without having to deal with changing requests and requirements from HR leaders.
The IBM CIO team could rely on the high availability of ODM on Cloud: the service was always up, except for planned maintenance. This reliability was great for the team to focus on changing their development process and infrastructure, so that they could deliver updates incrementally.
Security and authentication are critical for dealing with collaborator information. This is why ODM on Cloud implements the industry most advanced security standards, such as ISO 27001 and US standard HIPAA.
Results
A better experience for IBM managers, who are now free from the burden of sifting through various data sources to make decisions for developing collaborators.
By using the IBM Operational Decision Manager on Cloud to develop the IBM Cognitive Talent Alerts solution, the IBM team empowered HR leaders to make data-informed decisions about employees. Managers benefit from dynamic recommendations directly on their online Hub, which enables them to focus on building valuable interactions with their collaborators. Further, the IBM Cloud platform provides IBM with the continuous availability required to support HR decision-making for tens of thousands of managers about hundreds of thousands of employees across the enterprise.
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