Dave Ulrich’s three-legged model of HR organisation, developed in the mid-1990s and formalised in his 1997 work Human Resource Champions, remains the dominant organisational framework for large HR functions more than a quarter century after its introduction. The model’s longevity is testimony to the genuine quality of its conceptual architecture: the identification of shared services, centres of excellence, and HR business partners as the three structural components that allow HR to simultaneously deliver operational efficiency, develop deep functional expertise, and provide strategic partnership to the business. This was a genuine intellectual contribution, and the framework’s widespread adoption reflects a real need that it addressed well.
The framework also has specific limitations that have become more consequential as the environment in which HR operates has evolved, and that the HR profession has been insufficiently willing to examine honestly. Understanding what Ulrich got right, what needs updating, and why the gap between the framework’s original aspiration and most organisations’s actual HRBP practice matters for how HR functions should evolve, is both an exercise in intellectual honesty and a practical guide to building HR capabilities that are more adequate to the current environment.
What the model got right
The model’s most durable contribution is the identification of the strategic business partner role as a distinct and genuinely important HR function. Before the model’s introduction, HR was predominantly organised around functional expertise: specialists in recruitment, compensation, training, and employee relations who served the business by providing expertise in their specific domains. The identification of an integrative role, the business partner who understands the business deeply enough to connect HR expertise to business outcomes and who has the standing with business leaders to influence their strategic decisions, was a genuine and important conceptual advance.
The model was also right to identify the operational efficiency of HR service delivery as a legitimate and important objective that deserved structural attention. The shared services model that the framework promoted has, in well-designed implementations, genuinely reduced the cost and improved the consistency of routine HR service delivery in ways that freed HR investment for higher-value strategic work. This is a real and documented benefit that the framework’s critics sometimes underweight in their enthusiasm for its limitations.
The conceptual clarity of the three-role framework has also served as a useful tool for strategic HR design conversations, providing a common vocabulary and a clear structure for discussions about what HR should be doing, who should be doing it, and how the function should be organised to deliver it. Whatever the limitations of specific implementations, the framework has provided a coherent and widely understood conceptual foundation for HR transformation conversations that is genuinely valuable.
What needs updating: the four significant gaps
The model’s most significant limitation is the assumption that the HR business partner role as originally conceived, a generalist who understands the business and connects HR expertise to business needs, is adequate for the strategic demands that the most consequential HR business partner work currently involves. The most important HR business partner conversations in large organisations are increasingly about topics that require specific and sophisticated expertise to address well: the specific talent economics of a proposed acquisition, the leadership capability assessment for a major transformation programme, the culture diagnostic for a complex integration. A generalist with strong business acumen and good relationship skills is not optimally equipped to add genuine strategic value in these conversations. What is required is a combination of deep HR expertise and genuine business understanding that the generalist business partner model does not reliably produce.
The second gap is the model’s insufficient attention to the integration between the three structural components. In practice, the shared services centre, the centres of excellence, and the HR business partners frequently operate as separate organisational entities with separate leadership, separate accountability structures, and separate performance objectives. The integration that the model assumes, the seamless delivery of integrated HR capability through the three components working in concert, is rarely achieved in practice because the structural separation creates the organisational conditions for fragmentation rather than integration. The business leader who needs integrated HR support gets, instead, multiple separate interactions with three different parts of an HR function that are not well coordinated with each other.
The third gap is the model’s underestimation of the importance of analytical capability as a prerequisite for genuine strategic HR partnership. The original model was developed in an environment in which HR data was relatively limited and HR analytics was in its infancy. The current environment, in which the availability of HR data is substantial and the expectation that HR strategy is evidence-based is growing, requires a quality of analytical capability in the business partner role that the model’s original conception did not address. The HR business partner who cannot conduct or commission rigorous analysis of the human capital conditions that are most significantly affecting business performance is not equipped to provide the quality of strategic input that the role now demands.
The fourth gap is the model’s insufficient attention to the CHRO role and the conditions required for the HR function to deliver genuine strategic value at the board and CEO level. The framework is primarily about the internal organisation of the HR function rather than about its external positioning in the organisation’s governance and strategic decision-making architecture. The conditions that most significantly determine whether HR delivers strategic value, the quality of the CHRO’s relationship with the CEO and board, the degree to which HR input genuinely shapes strategic decisions rather than managing their human implications after the fact, the standing of the CHRO in the executive team, are substantially outside the framework’s scope.
What an updated model should address
An updated HR operating model for large organisations should address the four gaps identified above while preserving the framework’s genuine contributions. It should incorporate specialised strategic HR roles that combine deep functional expertise with genuine business acumen, rather than relying solely on generalist business partners for the most complex and most consequential HR strategic work. It should design the integration between the three structural components as a primary organisational objective rather than as an assumed byproduct of structural proximity. It should identify analytical capability as a core capability requirement for all HR roles above the operational level, not as a specialist function separated from the business partner community. And it should explicitly address the CHRO-CEO-board relationship as a primary determinant of HR strategic value, and invest in developing the capabilities that that relationship requires.
The capability investment that the evolution requires
The evolution of the HR business partner model from its current state to a genuinely more effective form requires specific capability investment that most large HR functions have not yet made systematically. The specific capabilities the evolved model requires are a combination of deeper HR functional expertise, stronger business and financial acumen, genuine analytical capability, and the personal authority to bring challenging input to senior business leaders who may not initially welcome it. Most HR business partner development programmes are oriented toward the skills of business partnership: stakeholder management, consultative selling, and relationship building. These are legitimate and important skills. They are insufficient without the deep functional expertise that gives the business partner genuine authority on the topics that matter most, and without the analytical capability to connect HR expertise to business evidence in ways that business leaders find compelling rather than merely professionally correct. Building these capabilities requires a different investment model: one that combines deep functional specialisation with business partnership skills rather than treating business partnership as a substitute for functional depth.
The organisations that have most successfully evolved the HR business partner model describe the evolution not as a structural change but as a capability change that eventually produced structural change. The HR BPs who demonstrated the combination of deep expertise and genuine business acumen were given more substantive roles in more strategic conversations, which created the evidence for the structural changes that formalised the evolved model. The lesson for CHROs designing the evolution is that the structural change follows the capability change rather than preceding it: invest in building the capability first, and the structural recognition of that capability will follow.
The Ulrich model was right about the problem and right about the broad structural solution. The specific implementation that most large organisations have built from it is less right than the framework deserves. The updating the model needs is not a rejection of its logic but an honest engagement with the gaps that twenty-five years of practice have made visible.