I’ve spent that last decade building people-centric analytics solutions for a broad spectrum of industries; from intelligence & law enforcement (where they are looking to characterize criminals) to healthcare & pharma (where they are looking to characterize patients).
Recently I’ve been interested in the challenge of the Smarter Workforce; specifically investigating analytics approaches that would allow companies to characterize skills, expertise, influence, sentiment, needs, desires, relationships, connectivity, or any patterns that would help them to better engage, develop, and maximize the value of their diverse and often globally distributed workforce, and allow employees to have more fulfilled careers that leverage their skills to the fullest.
Now its hard to consider analytics for social business without considering the role of HR in this new Smarter Workforce. Firstly, they have a critical source of employee data (albeit small and relatively static in comparison to other sources; such as social, project management systems, CRM solutions, communications channels, etc.), and secondly people are their raison-d’etre.
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post entitled “Could HR become the analytics powerhouse of the enterprise?” where I suggested that HR could not only become active participants in the enterprise bigdata analytics revolution, but take the lead in workforce analytics. However, now comes the big question(s)…
Is HR ready for analytics? Are they ready to integrate analytics into their own business processes? or to go a step further and integrate with other business data to deliver employee insights for the line of business?
Now since I’m a data scientist and not a HR person I’m totally unqualified to answer these questions, so if there are any HR folks out there reading this post, I would love to hear your opinion :)
Addition: It was suggested that I add a link to another of my posts which talks about the future of analytics and may prove interesting in light of this question, so here it is :) The Future of Business Analytics; from Transactional to Interactional
Marie's Ramblings & Ruminations 