When you go under the knife at a Calgary Health Region (CHR) hospital, you’d like to think that the staff hovering over you are being treated well by their employer.
More and more companies are doing this through online human resource management systems (HRMS.) These programs allow employees to check their human resource information online.
Some firms even have a “cafeteria” approach to selecting optional benefits such as insurance coverage. Now, the health region is about to take a great leap forward in this field. A $20-million leap.
“They don’t have a human resources system,” says Steven Bayliffe, “they just had payroll systems.” Of course he would say that, since he’s the general manager of Telus Sourcing Solutions (TSS) the newly formed company that won the bid to handle the CHR’s needs in this area for the next 15 years.
Bayliffe came from London, England, where he held a similar position with IBM.
He says TSS came out on top of the 15 companies that responded to a request for proposals because of “the commitments we made to the people care and the way we wanted to use this as a foundation client to grow across Canada.”
Translation: They won’t be trying to mess with a lot of people in a big hurry, and they plan to use the CHR as an example to win business from other Canadian health regions.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that the words “No Capital Requirement” figured prominently in the TSS pitch to the health region. Telus is bringing $20 million cash to the table to get the CHR up and running on the full suite of the PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Processing (ERP) software.
This product (and its major competitor, SAP’s R/3) are to big business what Microsoft Office is to the little guy – a standard suite of programs that can allegedly do everything from counting bedpans to paying nurses and running steel mills.
That is, of course, once you install, configure and customize the software, which comes on a gazillion CDs.
I speak from some experience since I took, and passed, the three-week course to be a “certified SAP consultant.” The vision is that you toss out all your ragged-butt software and worn out procedures, and go live with a sleek new system that reeks of best practices from around the world. Data moves seamlessly from one user to another and everybody wins.
In fact, we were told while cramming for the SAP consultant’s exam that, if we didn’t know an answer, we should put down “integration” and we’d probably get at least partial credit.
That’s the dream, but Enterprise Resource Processing has logged some colossal failures and wacky cost overruns.
Ask around at some big Calgary companies and even a certain Western Canadian university. (Note: this is not the University of Calgary, which is only now starting down the PeopleSoft trail.) You’ll hear what a moneypit an ERP implementation can be, and about the frustration of replacing a creaky but functioning old system with a new one that doesn’t work.
Sooner or later the kinks usually get sorted out, but it takes highly trained people, and they command big bucks. So the CHR is probably crazy like a fox for putting somebody else in charge of this process, right? “But wait, there’s more,” as the breathless late-night TV announcers might remind us.
One of the reasons Telus was selected for the job, according to Bayliffe, is the company’s wealth of knowledge in change management.
“It’s not a question of switching a database on,” says Bayliffe, “it’s getting the behaviour to change.”
So, about 170 former CHR employees became TSS employees on December 1, 2003.
He expects to add additional staff in the ERP and change management areas. Once Calgary is a success, the world is apparently TSS’s oyster.
“The strategy is to celebrate what people have brought, and to try to leverage this to other clients. As we layer on efficiencies, the opportunity for them is to be able to share them for other clients.”
Likely translation: If you’re a data entry clerk, you’ll probably keep doing the same job right here in Calgary, albeit with brighter, easier-to-use screens.
And you can see how close you are to retiring on a minute-by-minute basis.
If you’re one of the ERP or change management gurus, you might find your butt on a weekly plane ride to Newfoundland or some other future TSS client.
Consultants who take up this career path, in my experience, make a good deal of money but also seem surprised when their kids suddenly graduate from high school or get married.
It’s worth noting the CHR is a higher unionized shop, and that TSS’s mother ship, Telus Corp., has not exactly been a garden of peace and love in that regard.
Bayliffe is quick to place labour issues firmly on the health region’s side of the outsourcing ledger.
“That part of the decision-making process remains with the region,” he says.
“We won’t be driving change in terms and conditions through this methodology.”
As for what differentiates TSS from the Big Four accounting firms, which also love to do this work, Bayliffe says “we’re 100-per-cent Canadian owned, and we don’t have aspirations to offshore any of this work.”
Also, “because we aren’t one of the Big Four, we are able to be flexible in the way we apply our solutions.”
He’s new enough to the Alberta scene to be able to plead ignorance about Alberta Wellnet, a provincial health information project that, to say the least, was expensive and controversial.
He does say that the Calgary Health Region deal is a “guaranteed price, not a time and materials contract.”
It will be interesting to see where the money gets spent. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Telus, TSS notes in a news release that it will apply “the strength of TELUS’s network infrastructure, Internet Protocol (IP) applications, information technology (IT), data management and voice communications.”
Sounds great until you count up the number of friends who have switched their phone service to somebody other than Telus, or who are getting their long-distance calls free over the Internet.
It will be interesting to see how TSS behaves when faced with the choice of “Get It From Telus or Get It For Less.”
Taxpayers will be watching from their hospital gurneys.
Web watch
www.calgaryhealthregion.ca/newslink/nl_091603telusdeal.html
www.telus.com
www.peoplesoft.com
www.newswire.ca/en/ releases/archive/May2004/07/c0505.html
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
