Your HR system knows a lot about your employees… it can tell you who works for the organisation, which department they belong to, when they joined, what their role is and, eventually, when they leave. For the HR, management and owners, this information is essential for managing the employee lifecycle and keeping workforce information accurate. But, in today’s modern age of digital applications, business management and employee tools, there’s another question that is becoming increasingly important: What software does each employee actually have access to?
That information often sits somewhere completely different. An employee might be recorded perfectly in your HR system while having accounts and licences across Microsoft 365, Slack, Zoom, project management platforms, CRM systems, finance applications and numerous other SaaS tools. The HR system may know that the employee exists, but it doesn’t necessarily know everything about the software environment surrounding them.
That gap between employee information and employee software is becoming increasingly important as organisations rely on more cloud-based applications.
Your HR System Knows Your People
HR systems are designed to manage information about people. That’s what they do, and that’s what they’re good at. They provide a central source of employee and workforce information, helping organisations manage everything from onboarding and employee records through to organisational changes and offboarding.
This information can also be valuable beyond HR itself. When an employee joins, changes department, moves into a new role or leaves the organisation, other teams may need to act on that change. IT may need to update access. Finance may need to review costs. Department managers may need to transfer responsibilities.
And somewhere in that process sits the software the employee uses every day. The problem is that employee information and software information are often managed separately.
The Software Around Every Employee
Modern employees rarely rely on just one or two applications. Depending on their role, an individual might use communication and collaboration tools, productivity software, project management platforms, CRM systems, design applications, financial tools, security services and specialist software for their department.
Each application can have its own account, licence, subscription and access requirements, and that creates a second layer of information around every employee.
Your HR system might tell you:
Sarah — Marketing Manager — Marketing Department
Your SaaS environment might tell you:
Sarah — Microsoft 365, Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, Asana, Canva and several other applications
Both sets of information are useful. But when they remain disconnected, it becomes much harder to understand the complete picture.
This is where some kind of SaaS management solution becomes relevant… and highly needed for smoother operating of the business.
“The challenge isn’t necessarily that organisations lack information. In many cases, they have plenty of it.”
The challenge is that the information is spread across different systems.
- HR may know that someone has left.
- IT may know which applications that person can access.
- Finance may know what the organisation pays for those applications.
- A department manager may know which tools the employee actually needs.
Without a connected view, these pieces of information can remain isolated from one another. That can make relatively simple questions surprisingly difficult to answer: Which applications does this employee have access to? Which licences are assigned to them? What happens to those licences when the employee leaves? etc.
These aren’t necessarily questions that an HR system was designed to answer, they are questions about the wider SaaS environment of an organisation.
Bringing these perspectives together creates a much more complete view of the relationship between people and software. Connecting an HR system with the wider SaaS environment can help organisations identify changes sooner, review employee access more effectively and make better-informed decisions about software and licences.
This is one of the reasons SaaSi Hub connect to your HR system, and integrates with your SaaS applications. SaaSi Hub can sync employee information from supported HR systems and use that information alongside application and licence data to help organisations identify software associated with employees who have left.
For HR teams, the objective isn’t to take over software management. It’s to make sure employee changes don’t disappear into one system while the software consequences remain somewhere else.
Want to explore this further?
If your HR team is looking for a better way to connect employee information with the software your organisation relies on, explore our full guide to SaaS management for HR teams. It explores how SaaS management can help HR teams improve software visibility, support employee lifecycle management and work more effectively with IT and finance.
