People-Technology Vendor-Concentration Board Counsel — Enterprise SaaS

The mandate

Core HR, payroll feeds, workforce identity, recruiting, learning, performance, case management and analytics now depend on one software ecosystem and two tightly linked implementation partners. A regional service interruption blocked joiners and payroll corrections, while a proposed commercial change revealed that data extraction, interface ownership and manual continuity had never been tested together. Directors receive uptime summaries but no view of concentrated process, skills and exit dependency.

The adviser will challenge service criticality, contractual and technical dependency, privileged access, data portability, identity lifecycle, integration ownership, release concentration, subprocessor exposure, manual fallback, recovery sequencing and exit feasibility. Review will distinguish a vendor's platform availability from the client's ability to complete consequential workforce outcomes such as pay, access removal, safety training and protected case handling.

The appointment runs for ten months with monthly evidence reviews, four controlled dependency examinations and five committee sessions. A workforce-outcome concentration map and unresolved-evidence ledger will precede each board discussion. Renewal is limited to one additional month if an announced product withdrawal or provider transaction materially changes a critical dependency before the original term ends.

The counsel has no line authority, executive responsibility, procurement mandate, architecture approval, production access, contract interpretation, vendor-management duty, continuity command or committee vote. Management owns operations and sourcing; Technology approves architecture; counsel interprets agreements. The adviser may challenge unsupported resilience claims and request an exercise but cannot select, negotiate, configure or direct a provider.

Relationships with HR platforms, payroll firms, systems integrators, identity vendors, cloud providers, continuity advisers, auditors and competitors must be disclosed. Compensation cannot depend on renewal, replacement or migration. The remit excludes tender design, commercial negotiation, system configuration, penetration testing, payroll operation, incident command, legal advice, assurance and any referral fee from an alternative supplier.

Why the board wants this voice

People leaders see user experience, Technology sees applications, Procurement sees contracts and vendors report platform uptime, while operational dependency crosses all four. Directors need an independent view of whether essential workforce outcomes remain executable through outage or exit without turning the adviser into a sourcing advocate, architect or incident commander.

What you will own

• Map vendor, product, module, integration, identity, data, specialist-skill and partner dependencies to consequential workforce outcomes.
• Challenge recovery claims for joiner access, leaver revocation, payroll correction, mandatory learning and sensitive employee case continuity.
• Test extraction completeness, semantic portability, configuration records, integration knowledge, retention and successor-system usability.
• Examine release, support, subprocessor, regional hosting, acquisition, product-withdrawal and commercial-leverage concentration.
• Compare contractual remedy, technical recovery and executable business fallback without treating service credits as operational resilience.
• Maintain a board ledger of untested assumptions, single-person knowledge, inaccessible data, manual limits and management actions.
• Stress-test governance with regional outage, identity corruption, partner failure and abrupt product-end-of-life scenarios.

Candidate qualifications

• Advised boards on material HR-platform, payroll, identity or workforce-data concentration across multinational organisations.
• Connected technical and supplier dependencies to pay, access, learning, privacy and employee-relations outcomes rather than uptime alone.
• Challenged data-portability and exit claims through controlled extraction, reconstruction and client-team reproduction evidence.
• Evaluated integrator, subprocessor, specialist-skill and release dependencies alongside primary software concentration.
• Preserved boundaries among board oversight, operational ownership, procurement, architecture, legal interpretation and independent assurance.
• Produced decision-ready dependency evidence through outages, vendor transactions, product withdrawals and contested migration assumptions.

Non-negotiables

• Available remotely and for all five confidential Madrid committee sessions during the ten-month term.
• Direct people-technology concentration and exit-governance experience is required; general vendor management alone is insufficient.
• Will disclose HR platforms, payroll firms, integrators, identity vendors, cloud providers, auditors and continuity advisers.
• Will not select suppliers, interpret contracts, approve architecture, access production, operate payroll or command incidents.

1. 49 words maximum. Describe an HR-platform dependency that remained hidden behind acceptable vendor uptime.
2. 49 words maximum. Which evidence proves workforce data is usable after extraction, not merely downloadable?
3. 49 words maximum. What provider-failure scenario would you place before the committee first?