Error-free Management

Managing details of payroll, qualifications, transfers, and leaves of
government employees has been a cumbersome task, especially if maintained on
paper. A day-to-day management and an effective forward planning will, however,
enhance productivity and efficiency of government employees. Keeping this in
view, the Government of Karnataka initiated the B2B computerized human resource
management system (HRMS) that envisages creation and maintenance of an
integrated database of all government employees of Karnataka. The project
estimated at Rs 5 crore is funded by the World Bank under its technical
assistance funds for economic reform project.

According to Shankar HS, project officer, center for e-governance, Karnataka,
"A striking feature of the HRMS module is that all category of
officers/employeescomprising all grades and pay scales across state, central,
UGCare drawing salary from a centralized single platform. The HRMS module
offers huge time and cost savings in terms of collection and consolidation of
data to generate various reports." The benefits of HRMS for DDOs include
error-free generation of pay bill for all employees and getting all relevant MIS
reports of employees working under them. The employees also benefit through this
module since they can access information pertaining to their service register.

How it Works

The HRMS takes care mainly of two functionsservices record maintenance and
payroll generation of employees. Presently, the HRMS database maintains details
of more than 500,000 employees spread across twenty-nine districts and 176
talukas in the state. The need for an HRMS was because of the following reasons:

The finance department took nearly four months to collect and consolidate the
data of nearly 500,000 plus employees in the state, since nearly 60% of the
total budget was spent towards salary and allowances of employees.

It was not only time consuming but the credibility of data accuracy was still
in question.

The application was rolled out in February 2008, whereby more than 19,000
drawing and disbursing officers (DDOs) used the HRMS to generate monthly salary
bills of the employees. The application technical details includeDot Net 2.0
(C#), Ajax (Anthem 2.0), Database Oracle 10g, HTML reports, and Excel format
reports. The project is implemented on an web-based architecture on Windows
platform and hosted in state data centers.

Security features in HRMS include a user name with encrypted password and Mac
ID comparison. The government also plans to introduce biometrics fingerprint
authentication and smart cards.

A new pension office scheme is also been planned under the HRMS module, where
retired government officials can keep track of their pensions. Going forward,
the system will facilitate electronic transfer of pay bill data to the relevant
treasury and provide a consistent and unified picture of employee data enabling
an error-free and correct generation of pay bills and salary slips. Other future
plans include introducing digital signature certificates and calculation of all
arrears bills.

The HRMS merges HRM as a discipline and in particular its basic HR activities
and processes with IT, enabling budgeting and forward planning.

PC Suraj

surajp@cybermedia.co.in