Despite the plethora of data gathered over the past two decades, human resource functions have made little progress in using it to provide insights critical for strategic decisions.
This, according to a report just out from The Conference Board—Human Capital Analytics: A Primer. The Report highlights the urgency for HR departments to not only embrace analytics, but also to move away from straightforward analysis and towards prediction in order to be able to prescribe solutions that align with enterprise-wide goals.
“Today’s human capital functions have failed to keep pace with other business leaders in using analytics to make critical decisions,” said Rebecca Ray, Senior Vice President, Human Capital, The Conference Board. The goal of a proper analytics practice is to ensure that data is being tied to the strategies that matter most to the organisation and that human capital efforts are aligned with the corporate goals and strategies.
The Report examines the current state of human capital analytics, identifies best practices that can lead to rapid development and deployment of a sound human capital analytics function and creates a framework to better understand the process of human capital analytics that will increase the likelihood of success.
It also notes several strategies to achieve these goals:
1. Identify key business issues, problems or opportunities facing the organisation.
2. Build hypotheses surrounding the causes and probable impacts of an issue or opportunity.
3. Consider methodologies, consistency, information management, project management, technology and data governance.
4. Strive for high quality, alignment, transparency, credibility stakeholder input and executive buy-in as you implement your approach.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
