Payroll Modernization Project Improves Resiliency of Employee HR Data
Posted on Jun 28, 2017 in News
During the Analysis stage, the HawaiiPay project team completed more than 50 hours of Fit/Gap sessions with department stakeholders to determine whether delivered PeopleSoft functionality was a “Fit” or a “Gap”; the latter requiring further configuration analysis.
Led the Department of Accounting and General Services (DAGS) in collaboration with the Office of Enterprise Technology Services (ETS), the multi-year HawaiiPay project launched in November 2016 to begin overhauling and modernizing how the state processes payroll serving more than 75,000 full- and part-time employees across all branches of state government. One of the first steps was to migrate the executive branch’s Human Resource Management System (HRMS), maintained and operated by the Department of Human Resources Development (DHRD), to primary and secondary data centers hosted by project partner CherryRoad Technologies.
“This achievement marks the first step in running the state’s HR and payroll system in a state-of-the-art, technical environment under the ‘IT Managed Services’ model,” said Todd Nacapuy, state chief information officer and head of ETS. “Moving to this model shifts the responsibility of maintaining expensive equipment, along with very costly, controlled physical environments they require, to the vendor, thereby allowing state personnel and resources to focus on supporting and improving our HR business processes to run payroll effectively and efficiently.”
Pictured above, the HRMS migration support team includes (from left) Mark Yamamoto, Liane Lakin and Clay Higuchi of ETS, and David Keane of DHRD. (Not pictured: Sherry Shishido of DHRD.)
An additional benefit is greater geographic diversity, a disaster recovery term that describes adequate distance between primary and secondary (or backup) sites.
With the completion of the migration on May 22, CherryRoad is now responsible for maintaining system availability and 24×7 monitoring. Furthermore, oversight of the system and the vendor is transferred from DHRD to ETS. The department will continue as a user of the system, focusing on maintaining and using the data in fulfillment of its business needs, free from having to manage the operations and maintenance of complex and ever-changing IT systems. For now, HRMS users will conduct business as usual with little noticeable difference in the system, as the only significant process change affecting HR and payroll staff is use of a new secure web portal to access HR data.
The migration follows a major upgrade to the HRMS completed in 2015, which was a necessary step to making the previously at-risk system compatible with modern Cloud technology and to install the latest Oracle PeopleSoft software, which the system will continue to use.
What’s Next for HawaiiPay
The current phase of the HawaiiPay project consists of five stages: Analysis, Design and Build, Test, Deployment, and Support. Having completed the Analysis stage in March 2017 (including more than 50 hours of “Fit/Gap” sessions), the HawaiiPay project has moved into the Design and Build stage. The first “go live” dates for departments are scheduled in mid-2018. In the meantime, project team efforts are focused on system configuration and departmental IT readiness to ensure that the required hardware, software and network bandwidth are in place when the system goes live next year. For more information, visit erp.hawaii.gov/HawaiiPay.
Download Fit/Gap session photos at:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/144304884@N07/albums/72157679121194005
Link to previous HawaiiPay-related news releases:
https://erp.hawaii.gov/category/press-releases/