Office of Personnel Management officials are in charge of the new effort to create an online human resources recordkeeping and analysis system that charts the careers of about 1.8 million employees. It will eventually replace the paper filed in folders. Offering managers and their staff real-time access to such information, agency officials say, will streamline operations and improve workforce planning. The high- profile e-government initiative will eliminate personnel paperwork throughout executive agencies. Officials anticipate a potential savings of about $235 million in 10 years.
OPM officials have reached several milestones in the Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI) project, including the creation of a large data repository in which all employee records will reside.
The data warehouse will hold information on education, personnel actions such as transfers and promotions, retirement benefits and other activities. It will include training and payroll information, which officials did not previously collect.
The repository contains nine years of federal workforce history. OPM officials plan to add six more years soon, said Rhonda Diaz, EHRI project manager.
"When agencies come on board, it will give them a lot of benefits," Diaz said. Now, "you basically keep all [that] information in paper folders, and you have to go to a filing cabinet to get it." Other information is kept in systems with different levels of functionality and integration, according to the agency's Web site.
The electronic Official Employee Record will replace the Official Personnel Folder. OPM officials will scan the old records into EHRI and add new data to the electronic file.
"Today, when employees jump from agency to agency,…their information doesn't [automatically] go with them," said Miranda Ashby, director of federal accounts at GeoLearning Inc., which is providing Web hosting and security services for EHRI under a five-year, $7 million contract. "It's difficult for managers to get a snapshot of an employee."
Likewise, it's difficult for employees to view their records, even to check for errors. They often have to schedule appointments with personnel offices or wait for folders to be sent by mail.
There are other inconveniences, too. When former federal human resources official John Palguta worked at the Merit Systems Protection Board, which had outsourced its personnel needs, employees had to travel to Minneapolis, where records were housed, or put in an order for them. With the new system, gaining access to personnel records will be much simpler.
Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, an EHRI partner, have signed on to be the first agency to make the switch to paperless systems. Working with HHS on a fee-for-service basis, OPM officials want the HHS system to be effective agencywide by December, Diaz said. It will require creating 75,000 electronic records.
Insiders say the move is overdue. "The paperless personnel office was something we talked about for decades," said Palguta, vice president for policy and research at the Partnership for Public Service. "Folders were always bulging. The personnel folks were spending a huge amount of time just handling those papers."
In the 1990s, the government reduced its human resources pool by about 23 percent and the number of clerks who handled personnel folders by 35 percent, Palguta said. The push to consolidate, however, preceded an electronic system. "Unfortunately, the technology did not advance as quickly as folks anticipated," he said.
OPM officials hope to remove the remaining obstacles. The agency, which is in a testing and accreditation phase with EHRI, expects to transition the rest of the executive branch to the system in the next fiscal year, Diaz said.
Meanwhile, more than 20 agencies, including OPM, are already using EHRI's analytical and forecasting tools, such as ad hoc reporting and querying functions that produce reports showing workforce gains and losses. Other tools include statistical capabilities for spotting trends, such as a retirement wave, and projection-making capabilities that help managers predict how many employees will want training, for example.
"We hope the tools we provide will make people's jobs a lot easier," Diaz said.
OPM's Central Personnel Data File, which is updated quarterly based on information supplied by agencies, has a limited amount of details, Palguta said. The system lacks information on education, especially on degrees that employees earned after joining the public sector, he said. "We just never had the information available to take a look at the skills of our federal workforce."
With its wider reach and biweekly updates, EHRI will enable better strategic workforce planning, OPM officials said.
Looking ahead, they want to integrate the new system with other e-government initiatives, including e-Training, e-Payroll and e-Clearance, said Frank Russell, GeoLearning's president and chief executive officer.
But installing EHRI governmentwide—a fully operational system is slated for release in September—is a major undertaking. "It's a whole change process," Diaz said. "It's not as simple as throwing in data."
Having what amounts to their r€sum€s online, users will likely have security concerns, Palguta said. "For the more experienced folks, there will be a culture shock."
RELATED LINKS
- "Paperless HR initiative ramps up" [Federal Computer Week, July 7, 2003]
- "OPM poised to pick HR integrator" [FCW.com, June 3, 2003]
- "OPM poised for HR initiative" [FCW.com, April 15, 2003]
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Even HR goes high tech
The Office of Personnel Management's Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI) system will make federal executive agencies' personnel information available online. One of the Bush administration's 24 e-government initiatives, EHRI will be updated biweekly and will have three parts:
- A data warehouse with an extensive human resources history.
- Electronic employee records from hire date to retire date.
- Analysis and forecasting tools.
