Categorising the workforce

Ever heard of the “virtualization of the enterprise”? Well, it is a big development in the world of IT. Virtualization in the context of IT means that hardware infrastructure items such as servers, can be virtualized through virtual machines,etc., the aim of which is to more productively manage space and offer more sleek IT services.

There is a so called “golden triangle” in the virtualization strategy, focusing on the interplay between memory, bandwidth and processing power.

This is rather important, the IT guys said, as the modern-day data centre is fast becoming the cornerstone for almost every business process in any organisation. For the IT guys to give you all kinds of applications (apps) and services, they have to adopt new ways of doing that – hence the virtualization benefits of more data centre performance and predictability of that performance as well as the ability to allocate resources (capacity) for any given service as needed.

Listening to the experts last year, I picked up that they use certain categories of workers and profiling them as clients according to their typical IT needs and services that they require.

Using different type of worker categories to define their customer profile (service needs and requirements) made me think that we as HR practitioners could in fact adopt such categories for purpose of streamlining our own HR service delivery and be more customer-oriented as a result?


In fact, as HR Architects we should engage the IT department with a discussion on the groupings of our customer groups and settle on a shared HR customer grouping naming convention.

Examples of the categories used by the IT people are as follows (yes, in HR we use the some of the same terms, but we use a different reason or underlying criteria [legal categories] to group our employees whilst this list indicates to the service needs or customer profiles of each of the categories):

Office Workers: Usually office-bound and connected to the company’s network for long periods of time, typically the support services people such as IT, Finance, HR, Admin, etc. These people use a lot of apps from their desktop,, and when they move workstation, they prefer to keep their settings. Apps that they use range from MS Office, e-mail, ERP systems (SAP, Oracle) as well as web tools and Project Management software. It people realise that Office Workers do have specific IT services needs and that these needs differ from the other types of workers defined.

Task Workers: These are workers that sit in call centres, rendering services to clients whilst continuously entering data into specific apps. They are always connected to the company’s network and shift workstations regularly. Task workers need to have the best possible IT service performance when they access any seat or workstation to do their shift.

Contract Workers/ Guest Workers: They require network access for the duration of their work as well as access to their highly personalised set of apps and data on demand. As these workers are usually not permanently employed, they need to adhere to the group policy regulating the use of data and company intellectual property.

Mobile Workers: Mobile workers travel most of the time and do not need constant access to the company network. They do however use a variety of resource-intensive apps such as Office or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Mobile workers will use all sorts of mobile devices to connect to their e-mail and specific apps. This group includes people such as Sales Representatives and Field Service staff.

Remote Workers: This group of workers works off-site at remote locations where most of the time access to the company’s network is not possible. More examples of remote workers are offshore staff, outsourced or seconded staff, teleworkers and workers that look after remote operations or offices. They need secured access and control; they have device flexibility as well as diverse apps and users.

From a HR customer service point of view, we can design similar categories of workers for purposes of:

> analyzing their HR services needs in respect of each person HR activity or business process;

> build a service profile for them that indicates to the range, frequency and quality of HR services to them;

> design specific service metrics for the various groups;

> link all category groups to Talent Management areas – for example, one client company that we have worked for, deployed staff in China but those employees are not on the local (South African) payroll, but they are linked to all the local Talent Management activities.

Remember that HR service delivery will rest heavily on the reach and performance of the information and communication technologies the company has deployed across its operations.

The HR architect therefore needs to be consulting with the Enterprise Architect and/or the IT Manager and their teams to exactly set up the reach and level of performance of the data centers - it is crucial for the quality of HR services!

Gerhard