HR & IT: Onboarding And AD Provisioning

I worked in the HR world for quite some time.  As I made the transition to a more IT focused role I was surprised at how similar some of the conversations are.  Both HR and IT are striving to deliver new services and more value to the business lines they serve faster and at lower cost.

I think that HR and IT can work together to do just that.

In human resources circles employee onboarding has become a hot topic.  From an HR perspective an effective onboarding process usually means that new hire paperwork (like an application, background check, and benefit forms) is put online so that a new employee can complete it before they actually begin work.

Having new hire administrative tasks completed before arrival has some real bottom line benefit to the company.  The most obvious is productivity.  When a new employee arrives on their first day of work and they can actually start working, it’s better for everyone.

IT can make a tremendous impact to that transition.

A new hire is going to require a number of services from IT, not least of which is being properly provisioned into the primary source of authentication, Active Directory.  With automatic provisioning, IT receives the appropriate information (AD attributes) from HR through a direct hook to their database or through an updated file and populates that information into Active Directory.

Now your system recognizes this person as an employee, but they still can’t do much.  To get them productive, you want them assigned to the proper security groups and distribution lists.  In many companies that is still a manual process, but there are tools to dynamically update distribution lists and security groups.

Say, for example, you have hired a new salesperson in the Portland office.  Your new hire is not only recognized in the system, but the system has automatically put them on the “sales” distribution group, the “western region sales” group, the “Portland office” group and it has given them access to the “Sales” folder, the “Best practices knowledge base” and a host of resources that allow them to actually do their job and not miss important communication because they weren’t on the correct list.

Ensuring that a new employee’s onboarding goes smoothly and is as automated as possible saves both time and money.  Automated processes replace manual ones, and you are able to quickly see productivity gains.   Making sure that employees leaving the organization are properly de-provisioned may be even more important, but we’ll leave that for another time.

There are a number of soft costs that are impacted as well.  Your HR department is likely concerned about “employer brand” (the perception that potential employees have about your organization).  Your brand suffers when a new employee sits at their desk updating their Facebook page that they don’t have access to the resources that they need to do the job that they were so excited about accepting.

Employee engagement (Ning site) is another hot topic these days.  Many companies are endeavoring to connect with their employees in a number of ways to maximize their engagement with their job and the organization.  These initiatives are often communication focused, and the HR or Communications department may be looking for a way to create new and more specific distribution lists in near real time.  They may even be investigating new social media tools that live behind the firewall.  Having the ability to quickly and efficiently create dynamic distribution lists at a granular level enables IT to deliver new value to that line of business.

With the right tools HR and IT can work together to provide even better service to the business lines they support and to increase their own value as strategic partners.

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