about rather than glossing over.
One of the arguments for IT at board level wasn’t only “you need us or something bad will happen.” It was also “You need us, or something good will never happen either.
IT’s elevation wasn’t just about risk. It was about value creation. IT stopped being the team that fixed things and became the team that built things, enabled things, and in many cases became the product itself. One of the arguments for IT at board level wasn’t only “You need us or something bad will happen.” It was also “You need us, or something good will never happen either.” Payroll’s case is still largely built on the first argument. And that’s not a criticism because protecting a business from legal, financial and reputational harm is genuinely valuable. But it is a different argument, and it’s worth asking yourself honestly: Is payroll in your organisation purely a risk mitigation function, or does it create value in ways that go beyond accurate and timely processing? Some payroll functions
absolutely do. They provide workforce cost intelligence that drives hiring decisions. They identify anomalies that expose fraud or process failures. They hold data that nobody else in the business has in the same form. But not all payroll functions are there yet, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone make progress. The Technology Question One of the things that accelerated IT’s strategic elevation was technology. Automation took over the routine work, which freed IT professionals to focus on higher- value activity, which in turn changed how the
function was perceived and resourced. Payroll is being sold a very similar story by some vendors who would very much like your budget. And there’s something in it. Technology is genuinely changing parts of what payroll does. But here’s the reality that the vendor brochures don’t tend to feature (although it is changing!): complex, multi-country, multi-legislative, multi- entity environments is still more promise than delivery for most organisations. The human is still very much in the loop. Not because payroll end-to-end payroll automation across
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ISSUE 26 GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE
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