I\u2019m a nerd.\u00a0 I get on my bike or I go for a run, and I\u2019ve got my Garmin GPS running the whole time telling me how far I went, how fast I went, what my heart rate was, (ok I\u2019ll stop the list well before it gets to 20 items).\u00a0 I also happen to weigh myself 4 times a day.\u00a0 I like to know how much I weigh, what my % of water weight is, how fat I am, etc.\u00a0 I\u2019m a total nerd and I like my data \u2013 lots of it.<\/p>\n
When I get home from a routine Saturday ride, the first thing I do is download all the data.\u00a0 The data by itself is interesting, but only for about 3 minutes.\u00a0 The second thing I do is I trend the thing.\u00a0 I\u2019ll look at my ride side by side with the prior week\u2019s and maybe several others.\u00a0 Basically I\u2019ll compare the stats and get an idea if I was slower, faster, more powerful, etc.\u00a0 In other words, within a few seconds, I\u2019ll know if I\u2019m better or worse off.<\/p>\n
The thing is, I really don\u2019t care about that either.\u00a0 What I really care about is that I was really slow up Mt. Tam, or that I got dropped on the way into Pt. Reyes.\u00a0 It\u2019s not that I care that I suck (that\u2019s a given), it\u2019s that where I suck tells me what to work on.\u00a0 Sometimes, it even tells me that I didn\u2019t eat enough (a common problem if you guys know me \u2013 yes, I\u2019m neurotic).<\/p>\n
In the last 15 years, most of us have gone from minimal data in our reports, to some pretty decent analytics and\/or dashboards.\u00a0 We\u2019ve started moving away from the static and columnar operational reports and into trending and drillable analytics.\u00a0 With these new reports, we\u2019ve prided ourselves with the ability to tell our executives that \u201cturnover is down compared to a year ago\u201d, or \u201cthe cost of hiring in #BU has skyrocketed.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a wonderful day in the neighborhood!<\/p>\n
But I don\u2019t want operational reports.\u00a0 Neither do I want analytics.\u00a0 What I want has almost nothing to do with the data.\u00a0 I want insightfulness into the business.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s pretend I go to the head of my business unit and tell her that turnover is up over the last 3 quarters.\u00a0 \u201cCrap,\u201d she says.\u00a0 \u201cWhat is the problem and what do we do about it?\u201d\u00a0 Joe HR stammers and says, \u201clooks like we have an engagement problem???\u201d\u00a0 Trends and drills are really nice things.\u00a0 I know I\u2019m lying, our managers really do want this stuff.\u00a0 But they only want it because we\u2019ve starved them for data for decades.\u00a0 They really are only mildly interested in the data.\u00a0 Just as I only look at my bike ride speed out of curiosity, I know that the number alone tells me zilch.\u00a0 Just as knowing my average speed compared to last week tells me only if I was a little better or worse, ignores conditions on the road, and the environmental context.\u00a0 What I really want to know is how everything fits together to provide an analysis that give me the insight to act and make a decision.\u00a0 I want to know what to act on, when, and how to do it.<\/p>\n
HR\u2019s job in data is starting to transition yet again.\u00a0 We\u2019re moving out of the business (I hope) of creating trends and drills, and moving into the business of context.\u00a0 So the turnover trend looked bad.\u00a0 Now the questions is how we create a regression model around our data to figure out what the primary actors are for that turnover trend.\u00a0 Maybe for once engagement only has a small contributing score to turnover.\u00a0 Maybe what we didn\u2019t know was that the leader told their entire BU that nobody was getting a bonus this year.\u00a0 Perhaps the cause of that was actually some severe cost containment driven at the corporate level.\u00a0 How about some good analytics here to compare the cost of total turnover to the cost of those bonuses?<\/p>\n
At the end of the day, we have much cooler data.\u00a0 I\u2019ll give us that one (and the vendors especially).\u00a0 It\u2019s time though to stop being producers of just the data alone.\u00a0 It\u2019s not enough anymore.\u00a0 Perhaps when half of HR were \u201cgeneralists\u201d a decade ago this was ok.\u00a0 But we\u2019re supposed to be partnered with the business now and we still can\u2019t really diagnose what\u2019s going on, let alone how to fix things.\u00a0 Once again, let\u2019s stop being producers of data and become analysts of data.\u00a0 We need to start producing some insightfulness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m a nerd.\u00a0 I get on my bike or I go for a run, and I\u2019ve got my Garmin GPS running the whole time telling me how far I went, how fast I went, what my heart rate was, (ok…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2156,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[396,45,28,27,10,40,48,8,2],"tags":[369,370,373,372,371],"class_list":["post-2153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analytics-big-data","category-collaboration","category-communications","category-data-metrics","category-engagement","category-enterprise-solutions","category-hr-service-delivery","category-strategies","category-hr-technology","tag-hr-analytics","tag-hr-reporting","tag-insightfulness","tag-insights","tag-nerd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2153"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2155,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2153\/revisions\/2155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}