Onboarding is an IT problem wearing an HR badge

Everyone remembers a bad first day. The laptop that hadn't arrived, the account that didn't exist, the manager apologizing while filing an urgent ticket. HR designed a lovely welcome journey, and IT found out about the new hire from that ticket.

The failure is structural. Onboarding lives in the HR system, but almost every task that makes day one succeed is an IT task: order hardware, image it, create accounts, grant group memberships, ship to the right address. When those tasks cross a system boundary, they cross it as an email or a ticket, and every handoff is a place for the timeline to silently slip.

The handoff is the bug

Watch a failed onboarding post-mortem and you'll never find a person who dropped the ball. You'll find a boundary. HR entered the start date correctly. IT provisioned promptly, once asked. The two-week gap lived between the systems, where no one's dashboard showed it.

Our fix was to delete the boundary instead of managing it. In OhKube, a signed offer in People starts a workflow that is already an IT workflow: MDM assigns and stages the laptop, Desk opens provisioning tasks with due dates counted back from the start date, and the checklist is one checklist that HR and IT both see. Nobody notifies anybody, because both teams are looking at the same object.

The inverse matters even more. Offboarding through the same shared workflow means access revocation and device recovery happen the hour someone leaves, not whenever the email gets read. That gap is a security hole with a name and a badge photo.

Day-one readiness is a provisioning problem, and provisioning is IT's home turf. Give IT and HR one system and onboarding stops being a handoff. It becomes a join.