Specialized HR for IT organizations: to effectively manage IT staffs, employers turn to HR professionals who focus only on IT's HR needs

Do you know where to find the right talent to staff that looming enterprise resource planning effort? Can you ensure that the CEO's pet project has the information technology (IT) resources it needs?

When these kinds of questions crop up, or when times are uncertain, managing IT staff effectively becomes critically important. That's why more organizations are using specialists who manage human resources especially for IT needs.

Research by the META Group, a consulting and research firm specializing in helping businesses use IT more effectively, shows that the number of organizations using this specialist HR position--often called the HR/IT program manager--is growing steadily. By 2006, nearly 50 percent of IT organizations will have a specialist in this HR role.

Using a specialist to manage HR for IT isn't new, but the practice has accelerated in recent years. After initially being driven by Year 2000 compliance efforts, the use of these specialists recently has been pushed by other factors: A manic level of IT expansion led to a rapid increase in the overall numbers of IT staff during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s; employers wanted to contain costs and do more with existing staff; and IT began playing a part in helping employers meet new regulatory requirements, from the Sarbanes-Oxley law to new health insurance portability and privacy rules. As a result, employers now rely more on specialized HR for IT, particularly in Fortune 500 firms.

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How do HR specialists for IT differ from HR generalists? IT HR specialists typically have a greater comfort level with IT roles and responsibilities, and expedite HR processes. They also play a more strategic role in designing IT training and retraining efforts and leadership programs, and they ensure that compensation and reward strategies give IT a competitive edge.

IT staffs are essential to critical business initiatives, whether they're handling large applications such as enterprise resource planning suites (which provide a common platform for managing financial, sales, marketing, manufacturing and HR data) or ensuring that customer delivery and sales staffs have the best wireless technology available for communicating in the field. Many organizations say it's now a bottom-line requirement to have dedicated HR specialists who find IT staff rapidly and manage these high-knowledge employees effectively. Because IT is a specialized workforce--which typically has higher costs associated with it than some other types of employees--employers want to safeguard their investment. An HR/IT program manager is essential to fulfilling this expectation.

Meet Your Specialist

META Group research finds that the role attracts three types of people:

* HR professionals looking for the means to enhance their skills by becoming specialists. Being in this type of role affords the HR professional the opportunity to operate on more of a strategic basis for the IT organization, ensuring that basic HR requirements (legal and otherwise) are adhered to while working to develop high-performance IT staff.

* Former IT professionals with excellent communications and interpersonal skills who wish to perform a role that ultimately enhances businesses' ability to develop high-quality IT employees and enhances the IT employee experience. These professionals often are looking for a change of pace from a technically oriented career path.

* IT executive recruiters who have extensive knowledge of IT roles and want to apply that knowledge within a single organization. Though individuals with this type of background may not have the depth of experience offered by HR professionals, they often bring a knowledge of the business drivers for certain types of IT activities, as well as a solid understanding of IT functions and roles.

The primary requirements for the HR/IT specialist's role are the ability to understand the IT function and the ability to apply a thorough knowledge of the business processes necessary to support staffing, deploying, developing and compensating IT staff. HR/IT staff often have some reporting responsibility to a corporate HR department, but usually report directly within the IT function, most often to the chief information officer or a CIO direct report.

This role can be highly challenging. A single HR/IT program manager or specialist might fulfill all HR responsibilities, much as an HR generalist does, but confined to the needs of the IT organization. In very large organizations there is more likely to be a full-fledged staff of such specialists, who may take on specific responsibilities for different areas in a model called the "human capital center of excellence."

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Centers of Excellence

In the center of excellence model, the basic idea is to gather similar entities together to ensure a consistent approach and coordinated resources. At META Group, this means rolling up people, processes and tasks into a single unit for efficiency and better service delivery. Ultimately, the organization becomes less hierarchical and more horizontal. The people in this group would have to cross-train to be able to manage areas for which they may not have had responsibility under an older, "stovepiped" organization.

Where human capital is concerned, the center of excellence model means that all HR processes serving IT are in one place, giving IT consistent support from recruiting and sourcing to training, development, compensation and more. While you don't need a center of excellence to provide consistent, high-quality HR support for IT, the center is a convenient model for how you can structure these processes to enable that support.

For this model of a one-stop IT HR shop to be effective, the organization needs executive buy-in, through the formation of a human capital steering committee, with a strong leader capable of driving change throughout the organization. Also essential is employee life cycle management that coordinates all processes, from talent acquisition and deployment to resource development, performance management and retention.

HR/IT at Work

META Group has seen the center of excellence HR/IT model in action at a variety of organizations, notably those where many ongoing projects and initiatives require well-coordinated, coherent HR management.

In one large insurance firm, HR/IT resource managers (as they are called in this organization) manage the strategic planning process for IT staff. These specialists establish leadership development initiatives, determine how training should be managed as a whole for IT and discuss workforce planning needs, reviewing where the organization is headed and what the implications are for IT staff. This group also regularly reviews IT salaries and verifies that the company is meeting its needs with the right pay levels to ensure that the right levels of talent can be brought into the organization.

Since this insurance firm began using HR/IT resource managers four years ago, it has lowered costs for acquiring staff because the resource managers do more direct recruiting, eliminating some of the costs associated with agency fees and advertising. The firm reports a 25 percent increase in the number of IT staff promoted from within, further improving overall return on IT human capital investments. Turnover has dropped from a high of 20 percent four years ago to 8 percent today, well within what the company regards as an acceptable range. Unlike many companies, this firm has not had layoffs over the past three years, so it knows that its reduction in turnover reflects its changed HR practices--not the impact of events like involuntary departures.

In a Fortune 500 manufacturing firm, HR/IT program managers have rolled out a competency assessment and development program over the last three years, using it to develop a succession plan that extends down to project management levels, to improve career and promotion tracks within IT, and ultimately to stem turnover.

Before the arrival of a new CIO three years ago, specialized HR/IT support had typically extended only to hiring. Over the last three years, the firm has expanded its HR/IT support to improve human capital management processes, enable greater productivity and assure retention.

The overall economic slowdown forced this company to lay off about 5 percent of its workforce three years ago, with approximately 2 percent of that lay-off coming from the IT organization. Voluntary turnover also spiked as some nervous IT employees left the organization. For the past two years, overall turnover has been stable, though the practice of not replacing many of the departing IT staffers has increased existing employees' workloads, causing a morale problem.

The CIO's response to this situation has been to evaluate internal processes, using HR/IT program management staff to determine skill levels and assess gaps. As part of this process, training and development efforts have been greatly modified. IT employees now have a discrete learning plan, and the overall number of hours for training increased from 40 hours a year per employee to 48 hours. Managers are being held accountable for following through on making training available, and each manager must show evidence of a promotion plan for key employees--and deliver on it.

The HR/IT program manager created a process for updating employee competency and skill profiles to help managers identify high performers and find candidates for new projects. The HR/IT program manager also spearheaded a variable pay program in which high-performing IT staff members are eligible for an incentive worth 5 percent of base salary. The amount isn't large for most employees, but the program is a change from the past, when no variable pay was possible, regardless of the employee's performance or impact on the business.

A recent survey of this manufacturing firm's employees indicated that they perceive the HR/IT program manager as a critical resource for IT staff and trust that manager as a business leader who really understands the needs of the IT organization.

In another company, HR/IT staff assist the CIO in drafting a business case for keeping IT jobs in the United States as opposed to shipping those jobs overseas.

Managing human capital as a competitive asset will require change in many traditional practices and processes. Using an HR/IT program manager is one example of how HR is adapting to affect the bottom line directly. Specialized HR/IT staff align human capital more closely with business goals. Although much has been written about the core components of human capital management--recruitment, resources and performance management--most organizations still don't integrate these processes. An HR/IT program manager can help organizations overcome a large gap between knowing and doing when it comes to implementing human capital management practices.

Specialized HR for IT will continue to grow as other issues loom. The much-anticipated departures of large numbers of IT baby boomers over the next three to five years will create knowledge gaps within IT. Finally, the continuing complexity within IT organizations and the enterprise as a whole requires high levels of competence in planning workforce initiatives and ensuring adequate levels of IT staff. All of these conditions point to continuing reliance on HR/IT professionals.

Online Resources

For a link to a webcast, in which the author of this article discusses how companies use HR/IT managers to increase the collaboration between the IT and HR functions, see the online version of this article at www.shrm.org/hrmagazine/05March.

MARIA SCHAFER, PROGRAM DIRECTOR FOR EXECUTIVE DIRECTIONS AT THE META GROUP IN STAMFORD, CONN., HAS EXPERIENCE IN IT RECRUITMENT AND PLACEMENT, CAREER MANAGEMENT, ENTERPRISE LEARNING, MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Society for Human Resource Management
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