HR and IT departments are a drag on your business
Here is a post mostly relevant to those of you who work in large corporations.
When was the last time you applauded the work of your HR or IT department? Don’t know, right?
When was the last time you cried in frustration over something your HR or IT department did or didn’t do? Likely the last time you spoke with them.
Before HR and IT peeps get all worked up, please know that I am not criticizing you as individuals. Some of you are rockstars, and work for incredible departments.
In my opinion HR and IT departments wield far too much power in today’s business world. I don’t know how many times friends and clients have cried their eyes out over the last minute obstacles, or lead-footed approaches of their miscellaneous support departments. My own experiences, with a few exceptions, are equally bad.
Why are IT and HR departments allowed to derail plans, delay projects and generally make a mockery of other people’s hard work? I believe there are two reasons:
1) Senior management simply don’t know what IT and HR actually should do, or what they can’t do. Hence it is impossible to put realistic demands on these departments as they can always avert the CEO’s gaze with smoke and mirrors.
2) Both types of departments are in danger of becoming irrelevant. The combination of easy to use web apps and open source are making IT dept’s obsolete just as blogs, social networks and collaborative web apps are replacing HR departments.
My advice - Pick the best and brightest people from these units and involve them with your other teams. Their skills and knowledge is highly useful in the right context. Your HR star should be involved in your blogging and community activities. Your sys admin should help your dev team build fantastic system architecture for clients, and the software support team will probably to a fab job in web support.
