Even for those unfamiliar with the inner workings of large corporations, the general roles of HR and IT departments are likely understood.
Human Resources (HR) typically manages personnel-related matters, while Information Technology (IT) handles the technological infrastructure.
While this division of labor seems straightforward, some organizations are consolidating these responsibilities under a single leadership structure.
This shift is largely driven by the increasing integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the workplace.
According to a survey conducted by Nexthink, a workplace software company, approximately 64% of senior IT decision-makers in large enterprises anticipate a merger of HR and IT functions within the next five years.
Tracey Franklin, Chief People and Digital Technology Officer at Moderna, a biotechnology firm with over 5,000 employees, exemplifies this trend.
“I am responsible for the entire HR function and the entire IT function,” she states.
“That’s both what you would think of as core IT for the company, as well as the digital technology required to do drug development, manufacturing and commercialisation.”
She contrasts traditional HR practices with her current role: “Traditionally, HR departments would say, ‘we’re going to do workforce planning, so we’re going to count how many humans we need to get tasks done’. And then the IT team would take requests [for] the systems that we need,” she says.
In contrast, she views her role as an architect of how work is done.
“It’s [about] how work flows through the organisation, and what should be done with technology – whether that’s hardware or software or AI – and where you complement human skills around that.
Moderna has partnered with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and provided AI training to all employees.
“We’re saying, ‘here are the tools to rewrite how work gets done,'” she explains. “Having employees learn how to learn, be masters of AI, and recreate their own workflows.”
Prior to assuming her current position in November 2024, Ms. Franklin led HR at Moderna. While she underwent IT training for her new responsibilities, she has two IT managers reporting to her.
“I don’t think the leader of this function has to be an expert in one area or the other, but what they have to do is set direction, provide vision, do capital allocation, remove obstacles, set culture, and do employee engagement,” she says.
Despite the leadership restructuring, the HR and IT teams continue to specialize in their respective domains. “I haven’t turned an HR person into an IT person or vice versa,” she clarifies.
Covisian, a provider of customer care software and services, also merged its IT and HR teams in April 2023 under the leadership of Fabio Sattolo, previously CTO and now Chief People and Technology Officer.
“We’re talking about developing people on one side and developing IT on the other,” he says.
“If we bring these two together, we can have a common vision for how technology can have an impact on people and how people can adapt and evolve to leverage the new technology.”
He illustrates this with the example of AI implementation in call centers. While human agents will still address customer concerns, AI will handle the resolution process.
“We are developing AI considering that a human agent will use it,” he says. “But you also need to develop the human agent to make sure that they are aware of how to use this technology.”
Sattolo explains that previous conflicts between HR and IT are mitigated with a single decision-maker, noting, “The effectiveness and speed of developing things is much higher.”
When technical obstacles arise, Mr. Sattolo can often adapt the HR process as a workaround.
One successful initiative was an internal job postings tool that allowed call center agents to explore other roles within the company. Developed by the combined HR/IT organization, the tool doubled responses to job postings.
“Making people speak the same language was the hardest part, because IT and HR people are really different,” Mr. Sattolo says.
He notes that IT professionals sometimes struggle with communication compared to HR staff, stating, “I remember many meetings where I was asking the questions because they were not talking to each other.”
To facilitate collaboration, Mr. Sattolo appointed individuals with no strong affiliation to either discipline to lead multidisciplinary teams, acting as “a judge who makes them negotiate to find the proper solution.”
David D’Souza, director of profession at the CIPD, the professional body for HR and people development, advises caution regarding this trend.
“The skillsets of the two professions are complementary, and don’t have much overlap. Complex people issues require an understanding of organisational and situational factors, different to the specialist expertise required in IT.
“Greater collaboration between HR and IT makes sense, leaning into the strengths of each discipline, but merging the departments risks losing or diluting the specialist expertise organisations need to thrive.”
Bianca Zwart, Chief Strategy Officer at online bank Bunq, states that IT and the People team sit within the same larger team.
She asserts that this alignment is logical, as both IT and HR are responsible for building systems that support the broader organization.
Similar to many organizations, Bunq is exploring the optimal integration of AI and human labor.
They believe that closer collaboration between IT and HR is essential for achieving this goal.
“In that sense, it’s like a natural merger.”
At Bunq, there is no single individual tasked with determining whether a task should be performed by a human or AI.
Instead, the company empowers its 700+ employees to develop the necessary automations and AI processes themselves.
Bunq is on track to automate 90% of its operations by the end of 2025, but has not made redundancies and continues to hire new employees.
“In any company, people need to understand that they need to work in a completely different way moving forward,” she says. “AI will be taking away the repetitive tasks so they can focus on the more complex problems.”
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