HR and IT seek common ground

Human relations types and IT pros wouldn't seem to have much in common. It's your extroverted, people person who wants to make sure everybody at the company is happy vs. your introverted engineer who wants to make sure every node in the network is up.

Stereotypes aside, HR and IT do have quite a bit in common. Both are horizontal organizations that touch every part of a company and therefore have a unique view. Both are looking to use that knowledge to help businesses be more successful.

At a recent executive roundtable, leaders from both departments looked for ways they could collaborate to raise their own profiles within their organizations as well as to help make their companies more competitive. The Thought Leadership Summit on Digital Strategies is a series of executive roundtables co-founded by the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business in Hanover, N.H., and by Cisco . Moderated by Network World President and Editorial Director John Gallant, this session focused on Gaining Competitive Advantage through Human Resource Management.

"IT and HR are really kindred spirits," said Bob Carniaux, senior vice president of HR at Hasbro in Pawtucket, R.I. "We're each other's customers, as well as collaborators within the organization. We find ourselves both fighting for a seat at the table in terms of corporate priorities, both struggling to figure out what it means to manage our respective functions on a global basis."

Hollie Castro, vice president of human resource excellence at Cisco, added that the HR/IT relationship at her company is strong but could be even stronger. "Where I'd like to see it improve is our ability to drive business strategy in conjunction with finance. We view it as the triumvirate, the three legs of the stool. We're the three functions in our corporation that have the ability to see all the way across."

Share and share alike

Some companies have taken collaboration to another level - actually sharing employees. "I have an HR manager who is really on my staff," said Jerry Hale, CIO for Eastman Chemical in Kingsport, Tenn. "The HR manager goes back to the rest of HR and is an advocate for IT to help us achieve our mission and help us stay aligned with where corporate HR wants to go."

Conversely, HR's Castro added that at Cisco she has "one of [the IT department's] best and brightest that reports on my staff now, and that's been a key tenet of how we've built the teams."

Outsourcing decisions

HR and IT are faced with tough decisions when it comes to outsourcing. Both share the basic philosophy that it's OK to outsource some non-core functions but it's not a good idea to outsource functions that are core to the company.

"We've tried to either e-enable or outsource administrative-type roles," said Edna Kinner, director of talent management at Eastman Chemical. "We made a decision two years ago that doing retirement counseling, for example, was not core."

She added that decisions on what is core and what isn't change over time.