Internal Mobility: The IT Department as the Key Player in Employee Logistics

According to Microsoft, 41% of the global workforce is likely to leave their current employer. One of the main reasons is a lack of internal career advancement opportunities. If companies take steps to improve internal mobility, they must ensure that their IT department is prepared to handle these large-scale changes. Internal mobility presents a twofold challenge: IT offboarding followed by immediate IT onboarding.

Companies that encourage internal job rotations help curb employee turnover and boost employee engagement. However, for the IT department, every transfer involves a complex logistical process.

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1. Internal mobility: a strategic challenge hampered by IT logistics

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Investing in internal mobility (or "vertical mobility") allows companies to retain their employees' knowledge and expertise while redeploying them. This is a major asset for employee retention and a sense of belonging.

Key Challenges for the IT Department

For the IT department, employee mobility management combines the challenges of two processes:

• Decommissioning (partial IT offboarding): Disabling access to obsolete software and retrieving employee hardware that will no longer be used. Doing this at the right time helps save on IT budgets (by avoiding unused licenses) without impacting productivity.
• Onboarding (partial IT onboarding): providing the employee with the appropriate software access and hardware for their new role. This ensures a smooth transition into their new team and, as a result, improved retention.
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If IT is unable to carry out these two tasks quickly and accurately, mobility will fail, and the company will lose the return on its initial investment.

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2. The Challenge of Decentralization: When the IT Department Loses Control

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How can the IT department effectively and centrally manage the range of hardware and software resources for each transaction?

In the past, Active Directory (AD) was sufficient. Today,the explosion in the number of SaaS applications has fragmented access management across multiple tools and departments:

• The IT department and ITSM tools (such as Matrix42 or ServiceNow) manage the main access points.
• An access management solution like Okta can manage identities.
• An MDM (Mobile Device Management) solution like GLPI manages the IT infrastructure.
• Business units and general services manage their own software access and non-IT equipment (ID badges, vehicles).

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This fragmentation results in a loss of control and visibility for the IT department, making the employee mobility management process slow and risky (risk of retaining outdated access rights).

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3. Pyla: A central hub for optimal employee mobility management

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Given the complexity of tools and stakeholders, there are solutions like Pyla that allow you to centralize all the resources you use.

Pyla serves as the central hub of this star-shaped network for collaborative logistics management.

a. Centralized 360° repository:

• Employee devices and applications are all listed in a central repository that sits above the specific solutions for each type of resource (AD, MDM, etc.).
• The allocation of hardware and software resources is defined by employee profiles, ensuring consistency and auditability.

b. Coordination and automated workflow:

• Communication with HR and business teams is centralized. Either HR or the business teams initiate the process (often through the synchronized HRIS).
• IT receives a clear list of resources to be decommissioned (offboarding) and resources to be assigned (onboarding), along with the associated deadlines.
• Coordination is handled, and departments can track the progress of provisioning and deprovisioning through the software.

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4. IT: The Key to Successful Retention

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Investing in the automation of employee mobility management is a direct investment in talent retention.

• Retaining expertise: The company retains the knowledge and expertise of its employees.
• Retention and belonging: When managed effectively, mobility strengthens employees’ sense of belonging.
• Security and cost savings: Automated deactivation ensures data security and delivers substantial cost savings by eliminating unused licenses.

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In this internal mobility process, IT plays a key role in ensuring effective coordination among the various departments, thereby ensuring optimal management of the available resources. The IT department is responsible for ensuring that the process runs smoothly.

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