"OUR system could be used to run the election, if people were willing to vote by computer", says Mr Simon McRory of Graphite. His company is quite happy to take on the world, if it can, with its hightech approach to human resource management.
Only set up last month, Graphite Human Resource Management Limited, is aimed at helping companies maximise on their human capital. Its central product is an Organisational Diagnostic Profile system (OPD), which has been bench marked for Graphite by a number of leading companies and also State agencies. It went through a "beta release", or live testing system with selected client firms, in April, before putting OPD on the market.
OPD selects six factors Graphite considers central to all organisations. These are classified as leadership, goals, processes, structure, relationships and reward. Within each category are subdivisions. For example, under goals it identifies one of the key elements as clarity.
In some respects the system is a CD version of the old pen and paper survey. But in a modern firm the questionnaires can be transmitted to employees via terminals and the responses analysed in less than a minute.
People answering questions are given necessary explanatory information and can call up the help queue if necessary. The system will of course record the number of times a respondent seeks help, just as it has a self correcting system to eliminate responses that are inconsistent, suggesting mischievousness or just plain incomprehension on the part of the respondent.
Asked if the system did not smack a bit of big brother, Mr McRory says it can be programmed so that data is only broken to down to a set number say two responses. In this way anonymity is preserved. He accepts that in a very small sample respondents probably can be identified, but the same would apply to old fashioned surveys as well. In larger groupings he says it is impossible to identify individual respondents.
However the OPD system does allow a company to identify very quickly which sectors of the organisation have a high understanding of its goals and which do not - or which even disagree with those goals.
Finally, he says that the other great advantage of OPD is cost. The average survey using old methods is £33 a head. OPD costs half that and the unit cost falls dramatically for subsequent tests.
Graphite is actually a coming together of three groups. The Simon McRory Partnership provided the HRM and training component, ACES Limited provided the computer software expertise and Mr Ron Downy, former sales director of Kindle Worldwide, brought marketing skills to the company.
He says the new company will have three divisions, providing consultancy and training, advanced software like the OPD system and publications. In fact it plans to launch its first publication tomorrow. Personnel Policies and Procedures - the Law in Perspective is a 900 page looseleaf tome that will retail at £375, plus £4.50p post and packaging. If that sounds steep, you need to add £125 a year for supplements to update what is the most comprehensive summary of Irish and EU employment law available on this island.
It covers everything from contract law, to equality, health and safety, transfer of undertakings and, of course, termination of employment.
The total cost of the book, plus four years subscription is almost £1,000. But as Mr McRory points out, that is still less than the cost of one day's consultancy from graphite.
