Katella, where’s Peter?

Smart assistants have taken over my home, and they are coming for yours (if not already). I play my favorite tunes with Siri, dim my living room lights with Alexa, and command Google Assistant to cast Peppa Pig on Youtube to the family TV. Awesome, cool, meh depending on who you ask. But let’s be real, the time saving is phenomenal. You can get these working by the time you can pull out your phone (or look for it), unlock, swipe left left right right to find the app, then wait for it to first finish loading…

So why can’t we apply these time savings to the Enterprise? After all, with workers spending 50% of their time in meetings and navigating through the constant flow of emails and Slack messages, any time saved equates to improved productivity. If you want to request time off, you don’t want to open up a new browser tab, login to my HR system, wait for it to load, then go through 5 steps to enter your information before submitting. If I want to see my team’s turnover rate in the last 6 month or team’s growth year-over-year, I shouldn’t have to create a spreadsheet or configure a complex report, then having to filter down the criteria and time range.

Introducing Katella for HR (Namely/BambooHR)

Katella already connects to your Calendar (Outlook/Google Calendar) and Productivity (Jira/Tracker/Github) apps, enabling you to transact with easy-to-use natural language. With Namely and BambooHR app integrations, you now have access to a variety of HR tasks:

Get information on a worker

Instant access to your organization’s workers. You can search by name, email, or Slack handle, and can even traverse the Org Chart hierarchy.

Easily find information about your workmate’ job title, contact info, office location, supervisor, department, …

Find where a teammate sit:

… or be curious about yourself:

Get your team’s metrics

Get employee turnover metrics from any time range:

Get a breakdown of your team’s growth over a period:

Daily Glance

Katella is not just a Q&A engine. Behind the scene, she collects critical information across Apps and push them daily to you as the Daily Glance. If you’re currently using Katella, you already receive your daily agenda from Outlook/Google Calendar, blocking issues from Pivotal Tracker/Jira, and stale PRs from Github. With today’s Namely integration, you will now receive birthdays, anniversaries, as well as new hire notifications. Better yet, there’s nothing you have to do. Katella automatically figures out your team hierarchy, and only push events pertinent to your team.

If you also want to push this information to a Slack team channel, you can do so by configuring your Daily Glance.

More features

We are working with Namely/BambooHR to bring in these features next:

Time Off — request/approve time off, get balance, show team’s time offs.

Payroll — get paystub, benefit plan information

Reports — generate more complex reports on the fly from text or speech

Katella comes with a configuration platform to build skills and can connect to any RESTful API with industry-standard OAuth1, Oauth2, or API token. We will be looking at connecting with other HR providers like Workday & ADP in the coming weeks. If you have another App you’d like to connect to (or want to build-your-own skill), please reach out to our Support team.

Security

HR requires a different level of security, and we went through quite a few security exercises before releasing this. Each tenant’s data are segregated and never shared with another. All security tokens are encrypted and go through one-way hash, so no-one including our staff have access to them. Also data are processed in real-time and never cached or stored on our servers.

For BambooHR you can further protect your data by creating an integration user (with permissions you are willing to give) and connect this integration user with Katella.

What’s Next for the smart assistant

Katella (and Alexa, Google Assisstant, Siri) can execute an individual command fairly well today, but I believe the real power is to seamlessly integrate commands (across different Apps) and incorporate context.

Let’s go back to the home example. Imagine coming home and say “Hey <assistant>, help me relax”. What if your assistant can close the shade (daylight saving accounted), dim your light 80% to soothing blue (your favorite color), warm up the house to 72 F (‘cause it’s freezing outside), and turn on whole house music to your favorite tune, all without you having anything extra to say?

Similarly let’s analyze our command “Katella, where is Peter?” in the context of a work day. You probably want to know where Peter’s office is, but what if he’s in a meeting, or having a day off? Katella connects to your calendar, records your time off, and can access your location from your HR system. The same phrase “where is Peter?”, depending on context and situation, will give you the answer you are looking for — just like real life assistant would.

Another simple example: before processing your time off request, the assistant should be smart enough to look through connected Apps and find potential problems. Perhaps you have an Asana task due on the day you wanted off, or your Jira Sprint’s scope would be affected if you are taking off for two days, or your calendar shows you are meeting with a person outside the company on that date (potential customer, or worst, an interview candidate). Warnings should be shown and confirmed before time off is processed. Once it has been processed, other warnings might kick in for the person who need to approve the request.

Wrapping up

We are very excited at the 2018 roadmap for Katella. We have a lot in planning, including opening up the Skill configurator (take that Alexa) and building out self-learning capabilities for Katella.

Meanwhile, enjoy the BambooHR/Namely integration. Please direct questions/issues to our Support Team.