The position component contains information about roles that are performed in an organization by employees and stored as attributes of a position record. Information could include business title (CEO, HR Manager, Shift Supervisor, Plant Operator, etc), position description (for job measurement), skills and competencies needed to perform the role, remuneration survey classifications, job families, succession planning list, budget level, forecast level, filled or unfilled vacancy, etc.

In the late 1990s there was a trend to group positions into teams rather than to define individual roles. Contribution to organization goals was seen as team rather than individual efforts.  The application of Six Sigma principles sometimes linked bonus payments to teams rather than individuals. The team concept advocated a cross-functional use of staff rather than a specialized set of activities that a person was responsible for. The concept suited contemporary management theory but made it difficult, from an HRIS perspective, to identify training needs based on information about positions stored in the database.

A problem with many systems is that they either do not require a person to belong to a position or they have structured positions as a higher level and jobs as part of the position record.  For example, "person" belongs to a generic position called Salesperson. There is a job called Salesperson Western Region. This usually indicates that a system is still based on a design when it was necessary to build intelligence into codes in order to sort records. For example, when it was necessary to count all salespeople, the report writer logic could search on a common code and select all salespeople.

Attaching attributes to a position enables detailed analysis of training needs, identification of successors to a position, recruitment criteria, and so on. However, the information becomes a maintenance liability if there is restructuring of positions. The old attributes and linked records may no longer be appropriate (eg budget level, successors, skills required, etc). The tendency is to change business titles to save time, rather than create new positions in the HRIS database.

Within the HRIS database there is often a mix of real and hypothetical positions. For example, there is a tendency when building candidate lists for a position during the performance management feed-back exercise to identify future positions for a person that do not exist, such as "a senior position in Finance".  The exact position may not be known, or it may not be company policy to identify specific positions (due to fear of lawsuits later if a person is not promoted), but the purpose of the feedback exercise is to define a career path so that training and further experience can be planned.

Level TWO - Transactions / Reports