Running a business requires robust management of both People Operations and Information Technology. From a software perspective, the former can be accomplished using HR software (be that software HRIS, HRMS, HCM, etc.) while the latter can be accomplished using IT software such as the Electric IT Hub.

The apparent gulf between these two can be bridged in a number of ways, from large, cumbersome software packages which attempt to provide an “all-in-one” solution to tight, practical integrations which allow the HR administrator to work in the software they want to use while enjoying the benefits of a managed IT solution.

We at Electric chose this second, more versatile option when determining how to best handle the needs of SMBs. We have built intelligent, intuitive, and practical HR-IT integrations to maximize ease and minimize tedium for both HR and IT administrators. This is the story of how we did it and what it accomplished.

Built for the people behind the processes

The story begins with this backdrop: we recognized that it was a need, not a want, to eliminate swivel-chair operations, guarantee correctness of information, simplify and systemize common processes, and overcome the logistical challenges of getting the right hardware in the hands of new employees– all in the face of the fact that HR systems and IT systems are often entirely separate and are likely to be used by different individuals at different times.

Our first course of action was to identify exactly how any integration between HR software and Electric’s IT Hub would need to work –that is, how those working with the software directly would make use of an integration– to ensure a good experience for users. It wasn’t simply a question of making software that would be capable of performing some process or displaying some sort of information, but rather it was a question of overcoming the most common inefficiencies and frustrations dealt with by HR professionals.

Through a combination of direct conversations with our customers and partners, our rich history in the IT space, and our extensive experience of running SaaS software for IT, we identified the essential use-cases which HR professionals would be dealing with: onboarding, offboarding, hardware procurement, and application management.

Ensuring solution integrity

Once we identified these broad, abstract use-cases, however, we were far from finished our task– we next had to conceptualize and schematize our use-cases so that they were intelligible from the perspective of a software development team.

Fortunately, as Electric was built from the ground up to serve SMBs, our engineers and architects were already familiar with the fundamental concepts and processes required to build the integration functionality. It was easy to see that essential entity data such as employee data and department (group) data, combined with other miscellaneous data, would need to flow from the HR software into our IT Hub.

This meant treating the HR software system as a “source of truth” for several attributes of these entities. It also meant ensuring that our software architecture was up to the task of ingesting large amounts of information and using it in a performant fashion.

Loading employee and department data from HR software systems into the IT Hub was, conceptually, a straightforward task– after all, most HR software products expose APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) which make it easy for engineering teams to make unrelated systems talk to each other.

However, dealing with that data in a logical and secure fashion was not so straightforward. Working in an Agile fashion, our engineering team built out robust systems to continually consume data from HR systems and seamlessly integrate that data with ours, while building user-facing features that allowed for easy setup, configuration, and use of these systems. Numerous small challenges had to be overcome:

• How do we ensure that only the employees the HR professional wants in the IT Hub are synchronized to it?
• How do we ensure we correctly handle records which might be missing attribute data our system would ordinarily expect?
• How do we ensure that the end-user can know what information is sourced from the HR system and which lives in the IT Hub?

By making carefully structured API calls, employing thoughtful and robust development methods, and building out an empathetically constructed user interface –all using modern, secure tooling and infrastructure–, we were able to offer seamless integrations with numerous HR systems with near-real-time performance and serious problem-solving ability.

Streamlining onboarding and offboarding

Some of the problems we solved deserve special attention. Employee onboarding or offboarding (incidentally, we collectively refer to these two categories as “xboardings”) already appears moderately complex at even a high level, but it becomes a veritable labyrinth of business logic when analyzed in detail.

We solved this case in a fashion which both (as mentioned above) eliminates swivel-chair operations and keeps things simple from the perspective of the HR or IT administrator. When an employee joins your organization and first appears in the HR system, the IT Hub is able to prompt those responsible for dealing with hardware or applications to get ahead of that employee’s needs.

A simple wizard-like process makes the basic hardware procurement process as easy as one can imagine, and it can even use automated processes to grant application access to the new employee automatically and instantly. All the while, the numerous complexities, procedural blind alleys, and tedium one would expect to deal with when engaging with such a system are abstracted neatly away.

Enabled in a matter of clicks

The Electric IT Hub currently integrates with several HR software offerings, and every single one can be enabled with the click of a few buttons.

Every single integration is the result of thousands upon thousands of lines of code and hours upon hours of architectural and engineering discussions. It is also the outcome of disciplined coordination between engineers, UI designers, product visionaries, and industry experts. As time goes on, we will continue to expand our offering, both in terms of the number of HR software systems we support and the features and flows made possible by these integrations. And all the while, we’re keeping the HR professional at the center of our minds.