Comments on: The Tower Of Babel In HRM: Where Is Our Domain Object Model?

By: Michael A. Coughlin

Michael A. Coughlin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:30:33 +0000

Funny because it’s true and interesting because the solution is so complex to what seems like such a simple problem. Why can’t everyone just think like a developer? ;-}

By: Naomi Bloom

Naomi Bloom — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 02:41:32 +0000

Steve, thanks so much for your encouragement. We are making progress on having a more or less converging HRM domain model, at least across the HRM software vendor community, many of which are clients and/or licensees of my domain model “starter kit,” collaborating with the HR-XML Consortium, or simply arriving at a common destination just because great modeling applied to HRM gets you there, eventually. I hope to see, in my time, the death of employee status codes, job code tables whose entries outnumber employees, mass change programs of all flavors and many more of the worst artifacts of our early days flat file, miles of procedural logic, COBOL programs.

By: Steve Bogner

Steve Bogner — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:21:14 +0000

Great points Naomi – bringing some standardization to all the terms and definitions & etc would help everyone. The accountants have GAAP, double-entry accounting, and all sorts of financial regulations that govern their data and process definitions (or at least confine the variations to a small range). I don’t think we have that to the same extent in the HR world – so without that sort of externally-drive discipline, getting broad-based acceptance on a domain model might take a while. But I’m all for it!