Decentralized human resource management in public service - the italian national research council approach

The Italian National Research Council is a public company with multiple locations and many decentralized human resources departments. With decentralized human resources management, each location controls its own individual personnel issues such as attendances and leaves. One of the goals of decentralized human resources departments is to give autonomy to different locations, allowing them to adapt to the specific scientific climate of the individual site. However, the actual result of this form of human resources management is often disorganization, failure to follow unified standards or an ineffective application of those standards. This article describes a distributed and federated approach to Human Resource Management that is being adopted by the Italian National Research Council (CNR). In particular, this article describes the time and attendance software implemented by the Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT). The aim of the article is to describe the architecture of the system, the decision-making and choices regarding implementation adopted as part of the project, the main software components and their ways of interaction and communication.