The organization component contains information about an organization unit entity, such as the business description, hierarchical level, level description (department, division, section, etc), location (country, state, city, building, floor, etc), cost centre, etc. An HRIS attaches the information, as an attribute, to a record.

Many HRIS system administrators fail to define the organization correctly.  This is a critical problem because there is a dependence on the company's hierarchical structure, reflecting responsibility and accountability, to drive access to people records, HRIS information summary reports and workflow routing. 

Sometimes organizations avoid the difficult issue of defining and publishing staff reporting relationships. It may be politically insensitive to tell someone that a certain function is not their responsibility or there is a shared responsibility.  It could be a cultural problem (in some countries seniority, implied by organization charts, is not determined by organization reporting relationships - it may be age or length of service) or the way labour contracts were initially negotiated. It is impossible to map political and cultural sensitivities and those issues should be addressed outside the HRIS project framework. Sometimes an HRIS project will bring organization problems to the surface.

Level TWO - Transactions / Reports