Case Study: Hitachi Data Systems Peer Review System
Short form
The CEO met his 360 review KPIs for the first time not in the office, but somewhere over the Pacific, with no internet connection and a full review queue downloaded before departure. Hitachi Data Systems Australia had a mandatory HR review process that had never properly worked: senior executives were spread across the globe, spent more time in airports than in any office, and had nowhere to complete reviews except in windows that rarely aligned with when they were present. The paper-based system captured nothing useful. Redgum built an offline-first desktop application that turned dead time in transit into productive work — and synced everything back when the plane landed. A decade before the rest of the industry arrived at mobile-first and offline-first architecture, this project established the patterns Redgum still uses today.
The challenge
Hitachi Data Systems Australia — the local arm of the global Hitachi brand, a technology and data-centric organisation — ran a mandatory 360-degree HR review process. On paper. Its senior executives were distributed globally, moved frequently between countries, and spent more time in transit than in any single office. When the review windows opened, the people required to complete them were rarely in the right place at the right time. Reviews happened opportunistically, when executives happened to be available — which was rarely within the required window.
Two problems compounded each other and defeated the process entirely. The first was access: there was no realistic moment for geographically dispersed, perpetually travelling executives to sit down and work through structured HR reviews alongside everything else the office demanded of them when they were present. The second was capture: the process was paper-based. Even when reviews were completed, the results couldn’t be aggregated, tracked, or analysed. HR had no visibility into completion rates. Management had no way to extract meaningful data from its own performance management process. The system existed as an obligation but delivered nothing as an organisational tool.
The introduction came through word of mouth — a Redgum staff member described what the company built, their contact at Hitachi Data Systems Australia made the connection. The brief was clear: fix a process that had never worked.
What we built
An offline-first desktop application — a fat client that connected to Hitachi’s own database and data stores when online, and operated fully independently when disconnected. The architecture was built around the gap that already existed in an executive’s day: transit.
The workflow was simple in principle. Before leaving for a trip, an executive would open the application and download all pending reviews — the structured questions, the goals recorded in the previous cycle, and the assessments they were required to complete. On the plane, in the airport lounge, in the hotel room, wherever dead time opened up, they could work through each person: answer questions, review prior goals, log ratings and assessments. No connection required. When they returned and reconnected, everything synced back to the server automatically.
The first version was primarily structured text — questions and responses, cleanly organised. Later iterations added dashboards, quantitative scoring, and aggregate views. Executives could see not just individual review records but team-level patterns, completion rates, and key responsibilities across their reports. HR and management gained a live picture of where reviews stood — not a pile of paper forms that may or may not have been completed.
The deeper engineering challenge was the data sync and merge problem. When many people hold offline copies of shared data and reconnect at different times, keeping server and client versions consistent is genuinely non-trivial — especially when the data being merged includes structured assessments tied to individual records, review cycles, and goal histories. This engagement was one of the first where Redgum worked through those patterns at scale. The standards developed here — for managing disconnected state, conflict resolution, and sync integrity — became part of Redgum’s foundational approach to offline-capable client-server architecture.
The outcome
The CEO met his 360 review KPIs within the required timeframe. For the first time. The mechanism was not heroic effort in the office — it was dead time on a plane, made usable. The asynchronous model meant reviewers and their staff could each contribute within the required windows without needing to coordinate schedules across time zones or wait for a shared window that rarely materialised.
Hitachi was already a technology-native organisation, so the application itself required little explanation. The harder adjustment was the business process: once the friction was removed, the reviews had to actually happen. People who had never meaningfully engaged with the 360 process because it had never been workable now found themselves inside it. The cultural shift was less about adopting the software and more about a process becoming real for the first time. The technology didn’t change the culture — it removed the excuse.
The system stabilised into a consistent part of Hitachi’s HR operations and was eventually integrated into their wider HR back-office systems. Redgum’s primary contact moved to another company; the system continued running for approximately ten years, until web and mobile platforms matured sufficiently for Hitachi to migrate off the desktop architecture.
What this project demonstrated — well before the industry gave it a name — was that mobile workforce problems don’t require mobile phones. They require the right architecture. The disconnected executive with a laptop and a long flight had the same problem as the field worker with a tablet and no signal. Redgum solved it in the desktop era, and the lessons held when the platforms changed.