With reducing resources these days, it is getting more critical for the Management Officers to manage their resources, particularly human resources, more effectively and cautiously. In this regard, PICS plays an important role in the application of IT to support effective HRM. A special PICS development team was set up in the PICS Management Office (PMO) in 2002 in which Acting CIP, Mr Onyx Lau is in charge. Mr Lau said: "The team bears an important responsibility of significantly upgrading PICS and making it a useful and user-friendly HRM tool in the Force. In the past year, the team has made three major rollouts. Similar to the previous PICS enhancements, the team conducted a lot of consultations and user requirement analysis before creating ideas for the new functions in this rollout. "To materialise ideas is always the most difficult part due to the technical and resource limitations. We had to work very closely with ITB Programmers in the process of new function development and testing so as to ensure that the new functions meet users' needs and expectations," he added, "and they must be able to further strengthen PICS's capability in supporting HRM."

The PICS development team will organise a series of road shows in all Regions in mid July for collecting users' feedbacks and answering questions relating to the rollout. Interested parties may contact CIP ADM or equivalent in their Regions for details.