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Process Thinking Versus People "Skilling"
So what are the underlying causes of this IT/HR dysfunction? The No. 1 issue is HR's lack of understanding about what IT does. HR professionals assigned to IT often lack a technical understanding of the discipline or an awareness of the demands of a 24/7 production environment.
The CIO at one midmarket services organization explains that HR has a hard time keeping up with IT. "The screening and selection process of technical associates is difficult," he notes.
Add rapid technological change and the skills required to support complex technologies, and the role becomes even more difficult for an HR person to grasp. "Layer onto this technical profile [the need for] business acumen for selected roles, and it becomes almost impossible for a nontechnical HR person to effectively recruit the right candidates without heavy involvement by the hiring manager," this CIO concludes. The chief architect at a health care company concurs. "HR professionals do not understand the vagaries of the IT profession," he says.
"In my organization, we have fairly low expectations of our HR organization," says the executive in charge of new technology at a utility company. "We primarily use them for initial recruiting of new employees, assisting with employee performance issues, and providing HR policies and guidelines and general soft-skills training."
A second cause of this great divide is the relative incompatibility between methodical, process-oriented thinkers and the more reactive, touchy-feely types who populate the HR suite. The former CEO at a company providing IT services to midmarket CIOs gives his perspective: "I have discovered one of the great truths about IT effectiveness. It's directly correlated to a company's process effectiveness," he says. "HR people in general are not process thinkers. Most tend to be on the reactive end versus the proactive end of the spectrum."
The CIO at a Midwestern manufacturer views "HR practices existing on a continuum ranging from tactical/administrative/transactional [i.e., hire/fire/pay/provide benefits] to higher-order, strategic activities [i.e., mentoring, measuring performance, developing knowledge management practices]. Many HR groups haven't migrated to the more strategic zone."
The majority of Habitat respondents have no official development program in place for IT employees (see data box 3) or official policy to amplify employee strengths (see data box 4). And less than 5% of surveyed companies measure the ROI of their human-capital development programs for IT.
High-performance organizations work around the blind spots of HR in one of several ways:
- They create their own shadow HR organization (which can be financially and politically costly if discovered).
- They relegate HR to the low-value "blocking and tackling" activities of human-capital management.
- They communicate what the end-to-end process should look like, how it will be measured and what role the HR professional must play in ensuring that the process operates effectively.
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