Within companies, it's common to have several HR sources. Why is this?
Human resources manage a payroll system in which they integrate employees when they receive their first paycheck. This only includes employees who receive a salary, which excludes trainees of less than 2 months, temporary workers and contractors.
We call these people the 'HR edge'.
For HR, as these people do not need to be managed directly, this does not pose an administrative problem. However, for IT departments, the task is complicated by the fact that accounts need to be created for these people, but the information is not available directly in the HRIS.
So it's a mistake to talk about HR sources, since we're talking about people outside the field of human resources management.
At this point, a more or less efficient organization emerges, in which human resources people will fill in a parallel Excel file with these 'externals' (to the HRIS).
This leaves us with two HR sources for IT:
- HR users
- users on the periphery of HR
Users don't just come from a single HR source
In some companies, the system is rather simple, with one entity managing the employees and Excel files for HR management.
Then there are companies that have several legal structures with several payroll systems. You may have a French payroll system, an American payroll system, you may have a company takeover with different payroll systems, or you may even want to separate payroll systems within a Group.
The sources of information come from many different places, and of course there's also the HR side of these structures.
So we end up with several sources, employees who may change structures, and an impossibility to give a headcount at any given moment.
Basically, it's a mess.
HRIS peripheral users
Users on the HR edge (who do not have direct contracts with the company) are not listed in the company, and no one is in a position to give reliable figures.
The problem of collecting information (date of arrival, departure, manager, need for accounts, etc.) is a complex one, as it is the managers who manage their temps, trainees and service providers. HR doesn't want to hear about it, as it's outside their scope.
However, these users, like the company's employees, need access accounts for various software applications. The task of creating these accounts falls to the IT department.
And the latter finds himself in a delicate situation between managers and HR.
Information arrives in bits and pieces, and is often modified or added to later.
The big difficulty is to have centralized information in one place to say on the human resources side:
- How many of us are there? Who's here, because we need to consolidate certain points.
And on the IT side:
- Who arrives, who moves, who leaves and what do they need?
Get a snapshot of your payroll at any given time
Human resources departments will want to know their workforce at a given moment, and will start extracting information from each of their systems. This will need to be consolidated by extracting the necessary fields, and then deduplicated.
Except that a week later, the file is already obsolete, and movements have taken place.
For their part, managers don't manage the list of people they supervise, they manage operations. Everything to do with cybersecurity, licenses and access rights is not on their minds at all, and is therefore not dealt with.
They will have a human and not an administrative follow-up of their colleagues who do not have direct employment contracts with the company.
Each manager will have his own file, with his own nomenclature. Information is fragmented, with no data consistency.
The difficulty of a centralized repository is total.
When IT has to manage all the users, chaos ensues.
IT staff receive emails from HR about new arrivals, movements and departures. They receive e-mails from managers or operational staff about the creation of accounts for service providers, but rarely about departures.
Generally speaking, HR and operational staff need to call on IT to create accounts, but they don't need to call on IT to suspend accounts.
HR may have been made aware of account suspension issues, but for operational staff it's clearly not their concern.
The role of the IT department is to centralize the HR repository so that access rights can be properly managed in terms of :
- cyber security
- cost
In the IT department, it's a mess, but it's almost assumed.
An input/output file is often created, which is the movement reference file. This file shows who will be arriving and who will be leaving.
The mess comes from the question of who fills out this file?
All:
- HR does double entry: HRIS + IT file
- managers will fill in the
IT has to check the file regularly to see if there has been any movement. Then the copy/paste process begins to create and modify accounts...
In this merry mess we find :
- errors
- account creation oversights
- omissions of information, which inevitably lead to back-and-forth with the originators of the request
- things ignored almost voluntarily because they're boring
This process is so restrictive that it leads to fatigue.
You have to remember the date on which you looked at the file, the numbers (have there been any changes in dates, additions, account creations...), all those little pieces of information that create a sneaky mental load among all the rest.
Of course, since no one can find their way around, we send each other e-mails, make phone calls or bump into each other in the corridors to remind each other of the elements in the file.
And I've just described the rather structured process... because when it's not structured, it's the manager who barges into the office to ask for access on the day.
As far as departures are concerned, IT is informed when they take stock (every 3 to 6 months, or even 1 year), and when there's a farewell party (already heard!).
Why use an identity and access management solution to manage HR sources?
Youzer, like other IAM solutions, makes it possible to manage this kind of scattered source difficulty.
The solution will connect to each of these HR sources. A connector will need to be set up for each payroll system:
- a connector to the HRIS
- a CSV import connector from a Google Sheet that manages temporary workers
- manual input via forms so that managers can list the service providers they have
The identity and access management solution will bring together all these sources to create a database which will then be deduplicated at user level.
Payroll systems don't manage users, they manage contracts.
Youzer will therefore count people and not contracts, which is where the solution comes in.
This HR repository, in the broadest sense of the term, can be used to steer the governance of identities created in different information systems.
Installation
Here's how we set up Youzer for a customer with different HR sources.
- Identify sources.
- Connect all sources.
- Take the raw information from the various sources.
- Define rules for processing duplication and prioritizing information.
- Validation phase to compare the information uploaded to Youzer with the old file.
- Youzer has become the benchmark because the information is always reliable and up-to-date, clear and available.
- The repository is clean, validated by the team, and other connectors can be automated.
