To boost employee engagement at Morgan Stanley, Brian Kelly, executive director of human resources IT at the financial services company plans to make a measurable difference by developing 30 new HR apps in two years.

Until now, the team has been on schedule with regards to app delivery. By the close of 2015, Kelly expects delivery of half of the apps which will help Morgan Stanley’s employees communicate with the bank’s human resources department at much ease and flexibility.

These apps will be developed by making most of the Salesforce’s Force.com Platform-as-a-Service offering and run-time environment.

Rewriting existing ageing applications and rebuilding the apps with modernised features, Kelly shares a sneak peek into the HR app development at Morgan Stanley. The prominent 3 apps of the 30 apps ambitious project will be as:

• My Elections app: Through modernised features of this app, the employee can donate a proportion of their salary and bonuses to charities. While this app is based on an existing one, the employee can choose allocation of a specific amount to charity funds, while helping back-end HR staff in the administrative processes that surround deferred compensation. With different categories of staff being eligible for different compensation programs, this app will accommodate varied enrolment periods of individual employees.

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• Property Pass: As the bank operates out of many buildings in different cities, employees are sometimes required to relocate between cities, floors and buildings of various offices of the bank. Hence, the property pass app by Morgan Stanley will help the bank keep an auditable trail of furniture, equipment and decoration, the employees carry with them during relocation.
• Former Financial Advisor: When a financial advisor retires from the bank, they are required to sign an attestation saying they would not steal Morgan Stanley’s clients. However, these advisors will continue to benefit from the post-retirement compensation that they will receive from the bank branch they served. The Force.com app will allow employees to manage various options around compensation, even after their retirement from the bank.

The challenge for Morgan Stanley towards app development is to have the “look and feel” of Morgan Stanley. The apps should not just reflect on the bank’s branding but should also allow for excessive customisation as per employee requirements.

Say for example, in case of My Elections app, Kelly says: “It doesn’t look like a Force.com app. This is really important to us. We have some apps that we’re happy to build on Force.com right out of the box – an app might have five or ten users, it is fine, if it works, nobody says a word.”

“But if we’re going to deploy an application to our entire firm of 55,000 people, the applications must go through a very rigorous UX [user experience] analysis. We’ve actually employed an entire UX strategy for Force.com and we’re still working on it to make it more repeatable across different apps and make it part of our [development] cadence,” Kelly was quoted by Diginomica.

“Employee engagement is very important to us. If we’re going to be successful with Force.com, we’ve got to build applications that employees are going to want to adopt and use. I want them to be proud of the apps they use in their working lives.”

News source: diginomica.com

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