14. 12. 2023
Service Management
15. 03. 2018
Giuseppe Di Garbo
Service Management
EriZone for the Optimization of IT and HR Communication
How important is the communication between IT and HR departments?
One of the most complex situations I have to face during consultancy with our customers is the communication between the IT and the HR department.
HR personnel have to manage information on new hires, resignations, reassignment and internal travel on a daily basis. Each of these tasks has increasingly important implications for the IT department.
For example, we list some of the tasks related to a new recruit that must be communicated to the IT department:
- Preparation of the personal work space (with distinction between type of hardware – workstations, laptops and / or tablets – and software catalog of company applications, standard or customized)
- Creation of an e-mail account
- Creation of a domain account
- Creation of accounts for each of the business applications with appropriate profiling (one of the most complex and variable activities for each category of employees)
- Creation of a telephone extension
- Provisioning a printer
And even more frequently:
- Provisioning a smartphone
- Activating a nominal SIM card and related contract
- Provisioning a badge for access to company premises
If we try to consider them individually, each of the above tasks can be associated with a specific IT process that can be managed by different company functions with various sub-tasks.
Each of them, depending on the complexity of the company organization and the employment category of the person hired, could require one or more levels of approval, thus triggering further processes.
In many cases I have been able to verify whether the communication between the two IT and HR functions is really limited: the IT staff receives an email or a paper document from either the HR staff or their manager with (almost always partial) information on the IT equipment and user profiling to be prepared or modified.
This situation has these typical consequences:
- IT personnel must request clarifications with additional communications on each of the tasks, with a consequent lengthening of the time required for preparing the IT equipment and profiling the user
- The new employee arrives at the company and finds the IT equipment partially ready
- The new employee does not have adequate access rights
I have also had confirmation, all too often, that the situation is even worse when managing cases of resignation. The notification in these cases arrive very late, and in the worst cases it is managed at a much later date, with obvious consequences.
A recent research report on this situation is available from ADP and IDC[1], which surveyed 2,022 HR decision makers across eight European countries, which notes this situation:
- HR teams are not prepared to meet the fourth industrial revolution.
- Over a fifth (22%) of Human Capital Management (HCM) processes are still managed manually.
- 28% of respondents admit that IT is only slightly involved in HCM solution decisions, while 3% claim it plays no role at all.
- 37% of the data in medium-sized companies is still entrusted to Excel or similar databases, and does not manage human resources with a truly digital system.
How to improve communication with EriZone
With the digitalization of business processes, a close collaboration between those in the company involved in human resources and those in charge of information technology is necessary.
To improve this collaboration, you can use EriZone, our IT Service Management solution, which can bring the following benefits:
- Transparency and traceability of communications
- No loss of requests
- Integration with existing IT systems and information
- Transparency in measuring service performance
The two typical approaches with which EriZone can be used to optimize communication between HR staff and IT people are:
- Creation of customized processes for each of the tasks such as new hires, resignations, and reassignments and other internal movements, even those with multi-level approval flows.
- Taking advantage of the ready-to-use Activity Management process that consists of a set of related activities (tasks) related to an event.
In the most common situations, using the Activity Management process can be a great help for HR staff. This process can be easily configured and customized to handle typical HR workflows, and allows the creation of events, profiles and related activities that may have dependencies.
In the following example you can see a Hiring event with many activities divided into profiles: Business Applications, Domain account set up, Hardware, Mobile devices, and Software. For each profile you can select or or multiple activities.
The selection of each activity initiates a dedicated ticket in the preconfigured area of expertise.
Starting this process creates a series of child tickets linked to the parent ticket related to the Hiring event. The parent ticket can be closed only when all child tickets are closed.
A significant advantage accruing to those managing the process is the complete visibility of the activities performed or pending because, as the tasks are performed by the dedicated areas of expertise, the related tickets are closed with a note on the parent ticket.
[1] To read more about the challenges facing HR teams across Europe, click here for the full whitepaper.
Giuseppe Di Garbo
Consultant at Würth Phoenix
Hi everybody. I’m Giuseppe and I was born in Milan in 1979. Since the early years of university, I was attracted by the Open Source world and operating system GNU\Linux. After graduation I had the opportunity to participate in a project of a startup for the realization of an Internet Service Provider. Before joining Würth Phoenix as SI consultant, I gained great experience as an IT consultant on projects related to business continuity and implementation of open source software compliant to ITIL processes of incident, change and service catalog management. My free time is completely dedicated to my wife and, as soon as possible, run away from Milan and his caotic time and trekking discover our beautiful mountain near Lecco for relax and lookup the (clean) sky.
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