Sandy watches the HR industry grow up with her children

February 2007

Empower’s longest-serving employee Sandy Duncan has seen an HR software revolution since she joined the company just before the birth of her youngest son, who turns 21 this May.

As the fifth person at Empower (then Towhold Information Systems), Sandy thought her role was only a short-term job, providing practical experience writing software programs as well as social stimulation outside the nursery.

“It was an opportunity to work with some interesting people and get out of the house,” recalls Sandy, who is in charge of software development for Empower.

“It was a stimulating environment in manufacturing and there were many interesting projects including developing business process automation systems for incentive payments and automated ordering from stores.

“In 1990, we made a decision to focus on HR /Payroll and my role became a lot more interesting as we developed HR software using the latest technologies.”

Sandy graduated from what is now the University of South Australia in 1972 with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Data Processing. After working as a programmer for the State Government’s Hospital Department, she moved to London and worked for Shell UK and then returned to Sydney, where she was employed by CSC.

Sandy joined Empower in 1985 between the birth of her two sons, Jesse, 22, and Luke, 20. She said the biggest change of the past two decades had been in customer expectations. “Today, customers expect us, as an HR software vendor, to know and understand much more about their business,” she said.

“Some customers regard us as an extension of their own pay office and call on our expertise to solve day to day issues. Email has changed the way of the world. There seems to be an expectation that we can respond to and act on emails immediately. Expectations are much higher.”

Sandy said an important change was the rich HR functionality in the current generation of applications such as Empower-HR. “Early payroll systems had very little HR,” she said.

“Our major focus now is extending the capabilities in the Employee Self-Service and in particular Manager Self-Service where we are presenting more and more functionality and manager information for line managers to be accountable for their own employees. This is a very exciting development program that utilises the ease of access and intuitiveness of the internet to help managers manage.”

For more information about software development plans for Empower-HR, contact Sandy Duncan on 08 8332 6988 or email sandy.duncan@empower.com.au.

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