Xerox PeopleNet - Creating IT/HR Synergies

The Xerox PeopleNet Story Contd...

In early 1993, Xerox CEO Paul Allaire (Paul) began to put in place measures to achieve the 'Xerox 2000' goals³. Xerox wanted to bring about a paradigm shift in the company's human resource arena and make the workforce much more empowered, productive, accountable and satisfied. The empowerment aspect played a major part in Paul deciding to put basic HR information and applications at the hand of all the personnel through a Human Resource Management System⁴ (HRMS). Xerox already had a well-established legacy system of general employee and personnel database systems, which it did not want to tamper with. Most of the vendor solutions evaluated initially were designed for use by human resource managers rather than the typical employee or manager, as planned by Xerox. It was thus decided to develop the required HRMS in-house. This marked the beginning of the Xerox PeopleNet initiative.

Developing Xerox PeopleNet

Research work for the HRMS began in early 1993, and the overall concept of Xerox PeopleNet was formalized by June 1993. Xerox began with an internal HR survey to identify the desired objectives of the proposed system.

Suggestions regarding the priorities from which to develop an initial user interface were invited from the employees. The company took the help of consultants Tridec Development Corp. for this purpose⁵.

The company's existing infrastructure comprised workstations and the basic networking hardware under a mainframe environment.⁶

Xerox had in the past tried several times to make basic HR information available to employees. However, mainframe technologies were not user-friendly enough for the typical manager/employee skillset.

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3] Xerox 2000 was a future vision, the company needed to fulfil in order to be competitive in and beyond the year 2000.

4] A HRMS is a software application that combines many human resources functions, including benefits administration, payroll, recruiting and training, and performance analysis and review into one package.

5] Tridec is a New York based full systems management company that specializes in client-server and imaging applications.

6] In a mainframe environment, a very large and expensive computer capable of supporting hundreds, or even thousands of users simultaneously is used to run the organization's computer infrastructure.

Case Details

Case Code : ITSY004
Themes: Internet companies
Case Length : 07 Pages
Period : 1990-2000
Organization : Xerox
Pub Date : 2001
Teaching Note : Available
Countries : Japan
Industry : Computers and Information Technology

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