In an article in The Age (Melbourne, Australia) called Getting down and dirty with HR (August 31, 2005) Leon Gettler asks:
How low does Human Resources rank in our organisations?
According to US academic and consultant David Sirota, who has taught at Cornell, Yale, MIT and Wharton, in most places it's right at the bottom, usually sitting somewhere alongside the IT department.
That's damning news for IT, since HR is often certainly at the bottom of the barrel as far as respect goes and value-added contribution. HR has willingly exercised a "power without glory" role because it firstly liked the power and secondly proved incapable of articulating a value proposition beyond doing he transactional dirty work for line management.
I'm not sure that IT has the power, although it has been know to rule by fear in some organisations. But it certainly has often found itself at a transactional/support end of organisatonal life without being able to consult and articulate value to the business.
Sirota's view is expressed in his book The Enthusiastic Employee and the views in the article in The Age are canvassed here at Human Resources - Wharton:
According to its critics, HR departments can be needlessly bureaucratic, obstructionist, stuck in the "comfort zone" of filling out forms and explaining company benefits, and too closely aligned with the interests of management yet lacking the business knowledge to be effective strategic partners.
Dealing with these types of HR departments "is like going to the dentist," says David Sirota, author of The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want (Wharton School Publishing).
When people are asked to rate the quality of different functions within their company, he adds, "IT and HR are repeatedly rated the lowest."
The solution for IT can in part be achieved by strategic analysis of the role of IT in the organisation and the relationship and alignment between IT and the business strategy.
Those transactional pieces of IT that add little value can be effectively outsourced to a specialist group, and the relationship with the business can be improved by attention to alignment and business engagement.
Moving to a consultative role, and changing to a position of helping the business and management to use and buy IT services, rather than simply "selling" or responding to demands of IT services, is all part of a necessary transition if IT is to crawl above HR, and upwards! on the organisational perception scale.
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