A large corporation stood on the verge of a costly and politically dangerous re-organization. With a dozen independent HR departments representing as many subsidiaries, there was no good way to streamline HR information across the entire enterprise. It seemed necessary to merge all the HR departments into one HR "shared service," but this would be an organizational nightmare.
SharePoint provided a better option. During one of my Governance and Taxonomy Workshops, we created a single set of SharePoint content types based on the corporation's ideal HR taxonomy. Common workflows were assigned to the document types and dashboards were developed. The corporation established an HR governance team to own and manage the HR-specific content types and associated workflows as a Center of Excellence. The result? No physical restructuring was needed. Through the magic of SharePoint, all HR information was integrated into the same set of content types and workflows. Management enjoyed a common set of information tools to manage its diversity of HR Departments. Although they remained independent, they all rolled up to common HR reports, KPIs, Service Levels and Dashboards.
With all the data and processes integrated, much of the risk of consolidating the HR departments had been mitigated. However, once the HR data was integrated the corporation determined that a physical consolidation was not necessary. So each subsidiary retained a sense of independence, and the HR departments were able to avoid becoming part of a lumbering bureaucracy.
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