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GCN Home > April 24, 2000 issue

NIH takes attendance online

Upgraded timekeeping system helps agency manage federal leave policies

By Patricia Daukantas
GCN Staff

To replace an aging time and attendance system, the National Institutes of Health gave an intranet face-lift to client-server software originally developed for the National Science Foundation.

NIH, the government’s lead medical research agency, has increased its productivity with the new system, which has rectified some problems caused by the former system and helps managers deal with complicated federal timekeeping rules.

Filling out a time card or a leave request is an incidental activity that takes on great importance if the paycheck comes out wrong, said Richard A. Drury, NIH’s director of human resource technologies.

The health agency’s previous time and attendance system, which ran on a standalone PC, was “as clunky as you can imagine,” Drury said. It simply replicated standard paper forms.

At the end of each two-week pay period, the old system loaded the data onto a diskette that was shipped off for payroll processing. Employees found out the hard way when they weren’t paid for the hours they had worked, Drury said. “No matter what you think your agency’s core mission is, if your employees aren’t getting paid, then you haven’t got a mission anymore,” Drury said. “Your mission is timekeeping.”

In 1994, a study of the system called it a productivity drain, he said. The study looked at off-the-shelf time card software but found none suitable for federal use, he said.

The trouble with adapting commercial software for federal timekeeping, according to Drury, is that the private sector has fewer rules governing personal leave. “There is no more complex time arena than the federal sector, we discovered,” he said.

More than 40 types of federal leave exist because over the years Congress has layered new leave laws on top of existing ones.

“If you can put those rules in software so that people don’t have to carry them around in their heads, you automatically improve the quality of the system,” Drury said.



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