Where is HR?

Blogger: Kevin Kampman

Last week I accepted a speaking engagement on identity management with an uncommon audience: Human Resources (HR). I attended the Ohio Valley Chapter meeting of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management (IHRIM) in northern Kentucky. It is a rare event when someone from HR attends one of my tutorials or speaking sessions, and so it was intriguing to me to find a full audience of HR folks.

In preparation for the event, I contacted an HR director I am friends with and asked her what keeps HR people up at night. Her answer, including things like employee retention, competitive offerings, youth vs. experience, among others, did not have anything to do with identity management. So, I felt comfortable coming up with a list of IdM topics that I feel are critical to today’s HR organizations. The list includes

• Identity verification

• Roles and responsibilities

• Identity governance

• Identity audit

• Federation

Each of these topics has dependencies on information common to all biological assets in an organization (at the human level), particularly where current and accurate information about these people is required. This cuts across employees, contractors, partners, suppliers, anyone with an internal business relationship with the organization. These boundaries are much broader than the typical HR perspective.

The perceived lack of participation with identity management projects is a potential vulnerability to HR, in that IdM initiatives will move forward regardless of their involvement. This is not a good thing for HR, as HR runs the risk of marginalization if they are not seen as an essential contributor to the overall effort. This was my main theme for the discussion, and I expected to either be laughed off of the stage or acknowledged for my perceptiveness. Fortunately, there was acknowledgment that this risk is recognized and that HR is wants to come on board in the five topic areas we discussed.

To underscore the importance of IdM to HR, my co-presenter at the event, Carey Ellinghaus, a manager involved with HR transformation with The Hackett Group, provided a functional overview of IdM, primarily provisioning, and highlighted that top-performing organizations have engaged with HR to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness in IdM related activities. At the very least, our presentations represent areas that should cause discomfort, if not the loss of sleep, to forward thinking HR management. It is about time that my audiences include HR, in addition to IT, risk, and security.

Comments

[Jonathan Gershater]

Kevin
Your blog intrigues me as I have begun to explore Identity Management and the HR-XML standard.
See specific entries here:

http://blogs.sun.com/jo/entry/more_on_hr_xml_identity
and
http://blogs.sun.com/jo/entry/identity_and_hr_xml1

Was HR-XML discussed at your (IHRIM) meeting?

Jonathan

[Rob]

Where is HR, is a very good question in general.

I think they already have become marginalized as they are very reactive these days. Instead of working with business units on talent management, people development etc, they spend most of the time telling us what we can or can't do. Where I work the common practice is to recive an email with links to our Intranet HR page whenever you ask HR a question. Not really helpful when you are time poor and just need some help.

I think asking them to support something as "out there" as identity management will be a big ask for the HR folks.

[Ian Glazer]

With Oracle buying Bridgestream, are we seeing new vendor driven efforts to truly include HR in the IdM process and provide them with meaningful services?