Workscape Institute

Until quite recently, employers often had to make some difficult choices when seeking a single source for all of their benefits administration needs.  There were essentially three imperfect options:

Follow up:

1. Purchase, install, and implement an enterprise-wide system.  This is a major undertaking that requires a considerable investment of both dollars and resources and often takes years to implement.
2. Outsource all HR activities to a single third-party provider.  This option also carries with it huge costs and may not have robust solutions across the spectrum of needs.
3. Work with separate providers for health & welfare, retirement, and other HR and payroll administration functions.  While offering depth of functionality is specific applications, this option often sacrifices seamless integration and a common user-interface that the first two options may provide.

The benefits of a single source provider (aka, “one-stop-shopping”) become increasingly compelling as solution emphasis shifts from employer to employee experience.  For the employee, single source can provide a common user experience throughout the applications: the same look and feel, the same navigation rules, and generally a single authentication process.

The downside of “one-stop-shopping” is that the applications often don’t have the robust functionality that is available through individual, single-purpose applications offered from “best-of-breed” providers.  But while these best-of-breed solutions may offer deep domain functionality, the employee experience can be somewhat disjointed in that each application typically has a different look and feel, may have unique navigation rules, and may each require its own unique login credentials (ID and PIN or password).

The good news for employers is that recent technology improvements, along with some standardization protocols, can help employers to achieve the objectives of both rich functionality and a common user experience through HR Portals and “single sign-on” technologies.

HR Portals serve as wrappers for a host of HR and benefits applications that can come from various sources, both internal and external.  The HR Portal can offer a common end user experience.  Technologies such as: Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP; the Liberty Alliance Project; Security Assertion Markup Language, or SAML; and other standard commercial and proprietary protocols, are making it easier for companies to exchange information and to share secure authentication. 

In this way, employers can provide a seamless HR/benefits experience for their employees, but still leverage the deeper, more functionally rich applications of their best-of-breed partners.

How does this work?

1. Employees log in to their corporate network using their standard authentication ID and password.
2. Once recognized as an authorized network user, employees can link to the HR Portal, where they can receive important information about their company’s HR policies, procedures, and benefits, all without having to re-authenticate themselves.
3. From within the HR Portal, employees can “conduct business,” such as enrolling in their benefits, checking on their 401(k) balances and initiating transactions, or finding a doctor who is in their health plan’s network.

All of these inquiries and transactions occur within the umbrella of the HR Portal, providing the employee with an easy access path to disparate underlying technologies and even providers of HR, benefits, and payroll services.

Even without going down the path of an overarching HR Portal, employers can still achieve a higher degree of integration through single sign-on, or SSO, technology.  While the underlying applications may still have some differences in appearance and internal navigation, SSO technology mitigates the need for employees to have to remember and use unique login credentials to navigate between applications.

With the introduction and growth of these shared authentication technologies and robust, configurable HR Portals, employers can now achieve the integrated user experience that previously was only available through a “one-stop-shop” approach combined with the depth of functionality that can only be delivered by providers of highly focused applications.