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it built the professional infrastructure to support that elevation. Recognised qualifications. Clear career frameworks. Industry standards that businesses could benchmark against and understand. A language that translated across into finance, operations and the boardroom. Payroll is building this. The professional bodies are doing important work. But payroll is behind IT on this curve, and that gap matters more than most people in the function want to acknowledge. So, ask yourself this: If your CEO was interviewing for a senior payroll leader tomorrow, would they know what good looks like? Would they know which qualifications to look for, which experience to value, which questions to ask? Or would they be largely dependent on whoever was in the room to tell them? If the answer is the latter, that’s a professional
The honest answer is that payroll is earlier in its journey than IT was when IT started having its strategic moment. The trajectory is similar. The destination could absolutely be the same.
professionals are resistant to change, but because the technology to fully replace their judgment, their application and understanding of legislative knowledge and their ability to solve the problem that doesn’t fit the system simply does not exist yet at scale. Which leads to a third question, and it’s one for both payroll professionals and the business leaders above them: Are you investing in technology because it genuinely improves your payroll operation, or because someone told you it would solve a problem that actually requires people and expertise to solve?
Because replacing headcount with a platform that then requires significant
human intervention to actually function is not a cost saving. It’s a cost that’s been moved and partially hidden. And as a number of organisations are beginning to discover with some of their “AI implementations”, the reversal cost when it doesn’t work out is rarely cheaper than the people you let go. The Professional Infrastructure Gap One of the less discussed reasons IT earned its place ‘at the table’ is that
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GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE ISSUE 26
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