In a previous post on this topic, I explained how HR’s role has changed from enterprise talent management to global workforce planning and talent sourcing. With HR’s new role, it is only natural to conclude that the traditional methods of human capital management have to change.
The HR of old manages its function as any tribe chief would. In fact, traditional company structures are highly tribe-oriented. Every company has its finance tribe, its service delivery tribe, its sales tribe, its IT tribe, and so forth. Department managers run their tribes like chiefs–turf wars are much more common than any true sustained collaboration.
The new new HR has a very different mandate; it is viewed as a peer and collaborator with the other departments in the company–regardless of their tribal nature. This new HR is plays a key role in project management, process improvement and compliance initiatives. In effect, the new HR is an active member of the “virtual buying committee” for such initiatives and is a user of these now cross-departmental tools.
With HR as the peers and collaborators around the table, they can gain influence on how departments collaborate, and the tools they use to do so. One of their strategies: to get the company to stop purchasing and rolling out departmental tools, such as:
- A project management application just for IT
- A CRM application just for Sales
- A time and billing application just for Services
- An accounting application just for Finance
By enabling, even mandating, that department heads (ex-tribe chiefs) to work as peers and collaborators, the company selects and implements tools that serve the enterprise as whole. In turn, tools that cross the tribal boundaries encourage collaboration.
In the next post, I will describe a common enterprise software investment scenario and how the need for inter-departmental collaboration is fundamentally changing the decision-making process.
