I met with a benefits leader last week who owns both HR technology and benefits & comp. That's rare. Make the parallel to almost any other team: Finance controls their own ERP. Sales has RevOps people whose whole job is the tool stack. Even legal these days owns their CLM. HR is the exception. Maybe because the HRIS touches literally every employee, it gets absorbed into a corporate-y, full-company IT function, and benefits teams end up rate-limited by someone else's roadmap. I hear the downstream of this every week. A client told me recently, "We love the program. We have the budget. IT can't touch it until next year." Not won't. Can't. Benefits strategy is only as good as your ability to implement it. To the benefits leaders out there: what advice do you have on working effectively with your IT team?
Richard E.
1w
First is to establish relationships, trusts and who are the key influencers (not always someone with a big title); Understand IT's planning cycle and priorities; benefit programs are evaluated annually so see if IT can have a "placeholder" in roadmap for any vendor/system changes; Early on in any discussions with any potential benefit vendor benefit changes/implementations loop IT early into the discussions; People are naturally resistant to change so you have to demonstrate that benefits depart/ vendor will make the transition as seamless as possible; The IT people are customers of the benefits, so it is important to show them the value it brings to them and their family; Manage up - so benefits department should keep HR leadership informed so they can also talk with their peer in any executive meetings - no one likes surprises - springing this on IT will generally get immediate push back regardless of roadmap.
Sounds like an AI native HRIS is needed - anyone building one that puts control in the hands of the benefit owners?
Group Slack Channels, Automations, Including them on HRIS meetings, etc 😊
The “IT can’t touch it until next year” line hits home. What changed it for me was pretty simple: I stopped submitting tickets and started treating IT like they owned the outcome with me. Get on their roadmap before you need anything. If your first conversation with IT is “I need this integration live by open enrollment,” you’ve already lost. I’d sit in on their planning cycles even when I had nothing to ask for, just so my projects weren’t a surprise in Q3. Learn the plumbing. Benefits breaks at the integration layer, not the UI. Once I could talk eligibility logic and file feeds in their language, IT stopped seeing me as the person who wanted a shiny new tool and started seeing someone who understood how it all connected. And give them credit out loud when enrollment runs clean. Nobody thanks IT when the invisible stuff works.