Friday,
May 17, 2013
The
most modest organization has large amounts of information, i.e., “Big Data”, on
its operations, suppliers, customers, and especially on its employees. Even knowing as little as length of service,
hours worked, job function, performance data, and location can be telling as to
which employees are likely to succeed or not.
The basis for Big Data decision making is founded in that class that
most students ignored or only took the one mandatory course. That course usually covered the statistical foundation
concepts of data collection & presentation, variability, central tendency,
sampling theory, inference & hypotheses testing, regression &
correlation, indexes & time series, and seasonal & cyclical
analysis. While an employer with a few
dozen employees can manage them with no more of a sophisticated tool than a
good memory or paper notebook, even a middle sized organization of a workforce
of few hundred needs to look deeper.
To
illustrate the role of Big Data and Talent Management, the Polytechnic
Institute of New York University recently hosted a day-long workshop titled: “Talent Management 2.0: HR Innovation In The Big Data Era”. Speakers at the workshop included NYU-Poly
instructors from the computer science, engineering, and technology
departments. Additional speakers
included individuals representing PepsiCo, Aon Hewitt, Google, SAS, Morgan
Stanley, JetBlue Airways, and Accenture.
Aasonn,
a global systems and technology services consulting firm, recently reported on
a study by the MIT Sloan Management Review: “From Value to Vision: Re imagining the Possible with Data Analytics”. The
MIT study found that while “17% of product development, 19% of marketing, and
20% of operations respondents reported using analytics to drive innovation”, however
only 8% of HR organizations used analytics to drive talent acquisition and
retention.
In
what he refers to as “Talent Analytics”, Josh Bersin, a contributor for Forbes,
writes, “While most of the talk is about applying BigData to marketing and
consumer businesses, there is an even bigger opportunity to apply BigData to
Human Resources.”
In
the same way a marketer might look at customer consumption behavior patterns,
the recruiter would look at employee performance and correlate it with various
data points. By asking questions as to
who is performing and what they have in common, the recruiter may be able to isolate
discrete factors which identify employees as top performers.
Is
it significant that 90% of employees in department A quit after 18 to 36
months? Is it significant that 70% of
employees who were managed by manager B are now in middle and upper management
roles? Is it significant that all of
your best engineers came from small non-top 10 colleges, worked 12-36 months at
the Tacoma facility, are currently enrolled in a graduate or MBA program, and
have 2 to 4 years of military service?
Thanks for the share! I have also heard from multiple sources that big data is beginning to play a larger role in the industry. I am curious though as to how fits into the operating model of a business. Any input?
ReplyDelete,The most modest organization has large amounts of information, i.e., “Big Data”, on its operations, suppliers, customers, and especially on its employees.Thanks for sharing this blog.
ReplyDeletefinance write for us