The comments made about the government about excluding IBM from making future systems for the government stood out.
The reality is payroll should be executed by payroll specialists. I recently had to research payroll providers and there are players who service 20-30% of the Canadian population already.
This is another sign of folks not knowing how to source, design, oversee or implement software implementations.
From everything I hear about working with those companies—new and suitable replacements would be welcomed wholeheartedly.
That is, if they can maintain the same level of professionalism and ability to handle situations like you mentioned. Reliability is of immense importance, so it's not as easy to just hack away at it and sell people an MVP and iterate.
Your comment made me think of two things: Accurate payroll, and auditing of data.
ACCURACY: One of the biggest things I learned is that a correct payroll isn't a correctly executed payroll, but one that the employee is paid correctly. What's the difference? A lot of payrolls have a ton of manual adjustments to fill the gaps, which never easily get codified. If the barrier to codifying rules could be improved, it would pretty easily start to push around mainframes.
AUDITING: Existing platforms like Ceridian and ADP appear to do an okay job with their auditing - any calculation set to be done by a computer, rule, or human is forever recorded on the same leger. For what I saw, it was a healthy paranoia of tracking how everything is calculated for liability's sake. Faving this available, for repairing data and fixing payrolls is more important than reliably executing incorrect rules, or data. It creates a great audit trail for weeding out behavior.
I'm in no way endorsing one product, but I was reasonably surprised by ADP's newish workforce platform. Of course, once we got into the weeds, things broke and and processes needed to be hacked or split up, but it was only because the ancient mainframe underpinning could not be touched. Which sucked.
If Teyve said in Fiddler on the Roof, all traditions were new once. Maybe all new mainframes were new once.
Ripe for disruption, except that when you look at the laundry list of requirements, the thing that needs disrupting is the need for a billion different custom requirements, not a different payroll system.
I thought that too, until I learnt how all the payroll rules are fed into a mainframe for companies like ADP and Ceridian.
A mainframe stood between a client and their need.
Maybe we're after a better mainframe that doesn't need so much workarounds to do what has become payroll today.
I'm choosing to be optimistic that if a Stripe can navigate the payments industry, a payments startup could allow a better mainframe to be built through a rules engine that allows the degree of flexibility and data interoperability required in today's world.
The reality is payroll should be executed by payroll specialists. I recently had to research payroll providers and there are players who service 20-30% of the Canadian population already.
This is another sign of folks not knowing how to source, design, oversee or implement software implementations.