A Case for Enterprise Archiving
By George Florentine, VP of Technology
In many organizations PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) has been a critical enterprise application for years, even decades. But as the competitive landscape for human resource management (HRM) systems has grown, many organizations are choosing to move from PeopleSoft to alternative HRM solutions. However, as we will discuss in an upcoming white paper on the requirements for archiving HRM data, a decision to migrate from PeopleSoft will also include a requirement to access legacy data.
The curious researcher will Google “PeopleSoft archiving” and get a set of results with references to PeopleSoft Data Archive Manager.
They may think, “Great! Problem solved!” PeopleSoft’s add-on module facilitates migrating PeopleSoft data to history tables in a PeopleSoft database. The choice is obvious.
But is it?
The Gotchas
With a little bit of additional research, it’s easy to see why PeopleSoft Data Archive Manager is a poor choice when an organization has migrated to another HRMS. There are two main reasons.
PeopleSoft/Database Dependency and Fees
In our experience, the single biggest reason that customers migrate from PeopleSoft is cost recovery. Large PeopleSoft instances running on enterprise database systems can easily cost more than $1m/year to maintain. When you migrate off PeopleSoft, you want to recover that entire cost and not have a continued dependency on a PeopleSoft module or a requirement to continue to pay an Oracle or other enterprise database license fee.
Enterprise-scale Archiving
The other reason is scale. The archiving needs of most organizations go beyond PeopleSoft. For this reason, best practices recommend that application decommissioning and archiving be approached as an enterprise-wide, horizontal initiative that encompasses all business units and functional areas.
Typical goals in this type of initiative includes:
- Low cost of ownership
- Simplicity in deployment
- Simplicity in support
- Common archiving platform across many application retirement/migration initiatives
Even if an organization could figure out a deployment using PeopleSoft Data Archive Manager that wasn’t cost prohibitive, it would still fail to satisfy requirements 2, 3 and 4 above.
Enter Flatirons Digital Hub for PeopleSoft
With these considerations in mind, we have developed Flatirons Digital Hub for PeopleSoft. The solution is both purpose-built to archive PeopleSoft HCM data AND address the four requirements listed above in a common technology stack: it has a low cost of ownership, is easy to deploy and maintain, and supports archiving of data from any enterprise application.
One Archive – Contextual UI
Another advantage of Flatirons Digital Hub for PeopleSoft is that the core platform is capable of being configured to present sets of users with a user interface experience that is familiar to their domain.
For example, a healthcare organization that has a legacy PeopleSoft HCM application as well as legacy electronic health record (EHR) systems could surface archived data to its HR team and clinicians with views tailored to each group.
Here’s an example of Flatirons Digital Hub showcasing data migrated from a PeopleSoft 9.5 instance:
The HR user has immediate access to historical employee information served in a familiar context.
In the same Flatirons Digital Hub deployment, here is an example showing the view of historical EHR data a clinician would see:
The clinicians’ view lets them access archived data by patient search, encounters, and other relevant contextual information.
Finally, to demonstrate the flexibility of the Flatirons Digital Hub platform, in a recent hackathon we took the same technology stack and reconfigured it to showcase data from an open-source baseball database!
Final Thoughts
The point here is that organizations rely on multiple types of applications to run their businesses. Human resource management systems like PeopleSoft is just one.
For operational PeopleSoft instances that are looking to maintain high performance, including database backup/disaster recovery simplicity, PeopleSoft Archive Manager is an appropriate choice.
If, however, your organization has enterprise-scale archiving requirements to support an application modernization initiative, we’re glad to recommend Flatirons Digital Hub, starting with the PeopleSoft version.
Contact us to schedule a demo.
