Religious body reduces data risks and improves HR efficiency with golden record MDM solution

The challenge

Lack of HR data integration created risk and inefficiency

Being an institution with millions of devotees and thousands of employees brings many responsibilities. First of all, the leadership must inspire trust among its congregation and its staff. Secondly, the organisation must remain economically viable. And finally, the organisation must find new ways of attracting and engaging its flock.

But to achieve these points, our client needed access to complete, accurate, and secure organisational data. This realisation led them on a quest to identify and integrate any IT systems that were hindering their modernisation.

One such area in need of integration was the organisation’s personnel data. HR, payroll, pensions, and clergy records were held in three on-premise systems: ResourceLink, Civica UPM, and a proprietary staff database. Inconsistent data entry over the years meant that these records suffered from duplication and inaccuracy.

These disparate systems led to a waste of time and effort, as the HR team could not find all the information they needed in one place. There was also a high risk of error when manually transferring data between these three systems. And furthermore, the proliferation of software made it challenging to ensure data security.

To summarise, the downsides of these unintegrated HR systems were:

• reputational and regulatory risk of insecure HR data
• wasted time and effort of duplicate data across multiple systems
• high cost of maintaining multiple on-premise systems

For the sake of the client’s reputation and efficiency, it was clear that these systems required HR data integration.

The solution

Cleansing with a golden record MDM portal

Data analysis, cleansing, and de-duplication have been a key feature of many of our systems integration solutions. Some examples include the merging of global customer databases for publisher Elsevier, the de-duplication of royalties data for Hachette Publishing, and the creation of a unified GDPR application for NewDay Cards. Impressed by these relevant examples, the institution asked Influential Software to provide an HR data integration solution.

We used our experience of extract, transform, load (ETL) integration services to migrate the data into an HR data management portal. After migration, we used this portal to create a set of cleansed and de-duplicated data, known as a golden record. This now provided the organisation with a single set of standardised information for each member of staff, covering HR, payroll, and pensions.

Our team in this project comprised a chief architect, a lead consultant, and supporting software engineers. Working in agile sprints, we shared our progress with the client’s stakeholders every two weeks. This allowed us to include any desired changes and overcome any unexpected obstacles with time to spare.

Taking fewer than 90 man-days, our systems integration team completed the project within the agreed timeframe. Using the HR golden record data we created, the client was in a good position to transfer its HR processes to a single piece of software.

The benefits

Paving the way for cloud-based HR