Abstract:

In the disruptive world of today, due to the exponential expansion of new technologies, combined with the COVID-19 crisis, a significant number of challenges emerged. Information technologies (IT) has become an essential part of a new world affecting all the segments of life and work. Quite paradoxically, IT has also challenged itself, as a function in terms of potential to initiate changes, constantly transform to the next development phase, while simultaneously keeping the business continuity. In such circumstances, employees in the IT sector are severely affected. Having this in mind, it is interesting to explore the role of the human resources (HR) department in the transformation journey of internal IT. This paper aimed to present a case study of such transitioning model of going from positioned IT shared service to establishing IT as a competence center with an international company. On the one hand, it impacts employees and the paper outlines a solution for how this could be navigated and facilitated by HR, including employer branding. On the other hand, the paper presents how such a transformation impacts the business, in terms of investments but more importantly through return on investments (ROI) via synergizing, freeing and reallocating the resources. In the presented case study below, many proposals and recommendations on how to support the transformation from a shared service center to a competence center are outlined and discussed in detail.