Working at Advisory exposes me to many different companies and their approaches to managing IT infrastructure. Before companies either choose to hire someone who will own the IT responsibilities, or partner with a third-party company like Advisory for support, one common trend I often see is the involvement of the HR department in IT tasks.
Due to their direct responsibilities in people management like recruitment, onboarding, training, and the infinite other number of items on their plates, HR departments frequently find themselves tasked with managing IT responsibilities like device management and software license procurement. It may seem logical since they handle onboarding for new hires, doesn’t it? Wrong.
Below, I outline the typical IT tasks that erroneously end up falling on HR teams by companies that conflate their main job responsibilities with tangential, though unrelated tasks. With no designated IT department, they become the ones shouldering the time-consuming burden. If you’re in HR and find yourself juggling these responsibilities, it might be time to look for help.
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Device Procurement and Setup
This is by far the most common IT task I see fall onto the HR team. Since they are hiring people for the company, they also become responsible for procuring a new device for that individual. To take it one step further, they also become responsible for setting it up, going through the configuration, setting up a new account, ensuring the device is updated, and installing all of the applications they need, among a few other company-specific tasks.
At this point, you have likely spent about 1-2 hours setting up this one device for this one hire. Now imagine this being done for 5 people a week, and you are spending about 5-10 hours a week ordering and setting up new devices for new hires. This may seem easy and logical for the HR team to do when the volume of new hires is low, but this is a very slippery slope and can very quickly get out of control.
User Management/License Provisioning
Alright, the device has been ordered and set up. Now the new hire will need access to all applications required to do their job. The simple ones are email but after that, this usually requires the HR team to speak with the head of the department where the new hire will be, and discuss with them what applications they need access to.
After that, it is their responsibility to go into each application and provision the user. While this may seem relatively simple, the manual work required can make it prone to errors. If a new hire needs access to 15 individual applications, and just one of these is overlooked, it can lead to a poor onboarding experience.
“Simple” IT Tasks
Since the HR team procured the device, set up the device, and gave access to all applications for the new hire, they become the go-to if users have any issues with any of those.
Need a password reset? HR Team. Computer need a repair? HR Team. Need access to an application or folder? HR Team. Even if these requests may only take 10-15 minutes to complete, they will quickly add up once you start getting them in bunches daily, and it will continue to impact anything you were working on previous to the request being made.
IT Security
This one is by far the most vague responsibility, but someone needs to own it. Every company, no matter if you are 10 employees or 500, knows that security is important. However, not many know exactly what that entails.
The HR team may get tasked to make sure the company is “secure”, and this may lead them to doing a few searches in Google to see what makes a company secure. MFA? Disk encryption? Password complexity? Those are some great starting points that you will usually come across if you search online, but now who is going to implement these policies and prepare documentation to share with users so they know exactly what to expect? Or better yet, do you have tools implemented to assist you in implementing these policies, such as an MDM tool (such as Jamf) to push across all devices?
Offboarding
And this brings us to our last IT task that typically falls on the HR team. When someone is being offboarded from the company, this has a lot of moving parts to it. The first one is to make sure the device is retrieved from the offboarded user. Once retrieved, someone has to make sure the device has no damage and if it does, facilitate the repair of the device. After that, you have to wipe the device, clean it, and store it for future use.
The other part of offboarding has to do with user management. It is critical from a security standpoint that the user is removed from ALL applications they have access to, or that can quickly become a huge security liability. Also, you must ensure all of the data/email/etc is being transferred to their manager (or anyone else). Not only is this task time-consuming, but it also leaves room for error. If one of the many tasks in this process isn’t completed promptly, this can lead to a security breach down the road such as an inactive account being targeted by a hacker. A dormant account from an inactive user is more prone to getting hacked. Not only is this a security concern, but this will also have financial implications as leaving accounts active that are no longer needed will incur additional costs.
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The purpose of me sharing this isn’t for HR teams to get upset that they are stuck completing these IT tasks for their company. In some instances, depending on the size of the company and the rate of growth, it makes sense for the HR team to support these tasks and it is entirely feasible from workload management. However, as companies continue to grow and increase the speed of growth, they usually forget to address these tasks, and having your HR team complete them is not a scalable solution. The more the HR team has to focus on these tasks, the less time they have to focus on their main responsibilities, such as bringing in great talent for the company.
If you’re in HR and find yourself overwhelmed with IT tasks, it might be time to consider asking for help or seeking alternative solutions to ensure the efficient operation of your company’s IT infrastructure. If you aren’t sure in what form you can get help, I’d be more than happy to discuss the IT tasks you find yourself currently doing, and how you can optimize them. Book some time with me here!