More than two thousand years ago, the Library of Alexandria held the greatest collection of information in the ancient world. Its stacks overflowed with historical data as well as the newest works in math and science. Tasked with the collection of all the knowledge of the world, the library established a policy, supported by a royal mandate, of collecting books from every ship that came to Alexandria’s thriving seaport and making copies. No known index of the library has survived since its destruction during the 3rd century AD, so no one is certain just how vast its contents were, but it is believed to have held more than half a million papyrus scrolls.
While we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief that modern databases and archives are less susceptible to attacks by Roman emperors, a lesson worth taking away from this is the library’s methodology.
Imagine that your contingent labor program is the city of Alexandria, a thriving port with workers passing through like those trade ships, and on each ship is information about on-boarding checklists, desk space, phone lines, time cards, contracts, the provisioning of computers, and more. When those workers pass through, do you keep all that information in one centralized archive?
Many workforce programs use multiple systems to manage their contingent labor, including the VMS, ERP systems, timecard systems, and HRM systems, not to mention a daunting number of file cabinets. The data tends to end up in different places, when it would benefit from consolidation and archiving. Paper records get damaged, hidden under stacks of other records, spilled on, and worse.
As it happens, any modern VMS is already positioned to serve as a central archive or “system of record.” Since the majority of program data tends to pass through the VMS at some point, it’s easy enough to configure the VMS as the final destination of that data. Consolidating the data offers a number of obvious benefits to the program, including easier quality management and compliance and easier access to the data for analytical purposes.
The future of services procurement technology sometimes requires a change from its users as well as from the technology itself. Inertia can be hard to overcome, but in the 21st century success depends heavily on controlling and accessing information. Sometimes it isn’t about knowing what the facts are as much where the facts are. How’s your data archive looking?