I have an argument with my wife every few years.\u00a0 I tend to like cars with a bit more horsepower.\u00a0 I mean, that 1 time a year when there is a really stupid driver about to crash into you, a few extra horses comes in handy when you really need to speed away.\u00a0 The problem is that 99.99% of the time, that extra horsepower is a luxury you really don\u2019t need.\u00a0 You\u2019d get from point A to point B just as safely, and probably just as fast.\u00a0 Sometimes though, that engine really does matter.\u00a0 (My wife wins 90% of arguments by the way)<\/p>\n
Everyone in HRIT is talking about big data these days.\u00a0 Unless I completely don\u2019t get it, I thought this is what we\u2019ve been working towards for years.\u00a0 I mean, having ALL of our talent data, core HR, learning, recruiting, payroll, benefits, compensation, safety, etc data all in the same place and running analytics against it all was always part of the data warehouse plan.\u00a0 I mean come on, what else is ETL for if not to grab data from all over the place, aggregate it into the ODS, and then figure out how to make sense of it all?\u00a0 We\u2019ve built a nice engine that caters to our needs 99.99% of the time.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m going to propose something:\u00a0 Big data does not matter to HR.\u00a0 It\u2019s just a new naming of something that does matter.\u00a0 Business intelligence and truly focused analytics is what makes us focus our actions in the right places.\u00a0 BI, Big Data, I don\u2019t care what we call it.\u00a0 Just do it.\u00a0 Either way, HR does not have a big data need at this point.\u00a0 I\u2019d propose that we can use Big Data technology to speed up our analytics outcomes, but that\u2019s about all we need for the next few years.<\/p>\n
In my simplified definition of Big Data, it comes down to two major attributes: the use of external data sources, and the lack of need to normalize data across sources.\u00a0 If we look at it from this point of view, the reality would state that almost no HR department on the face of the earth is ready to take HR data and compare it with government census data, or employment data.\u00a0 Let\u2019s get really creative and take local population health statistics combined with local census to get some really interesting indicators on our own employee population health.\u00a0 Right, we\u2019re just not there yet.<\/p>\n
Let me reverse the thinking for a moment though.\u00a0 What about the other 0.01% of the time that our traditional BI tools just won\u2019t help us out?\u00a0 Going back to benefits examples, how many global organizations can really directly compare benefit costs across the entire world?\u00a0 How many of those same global organizations have a great handle on every payroll code?\u00a0 Much of the problem is that the data is often outsourced, and definitely not standardized.\u00a0 Collecting the information is problematic in the first place, but next to impossible to standardize annual changes in the second. The beauty of Big Data is that in these cases, you\u2019d actually be able to gather all of that data and not worry about how to translate it all into equal meanings.\u00a0 The data might aggregate in a more \u201cdirectional\u201d way than you\u2019d like, but you\u2019d probably still have an acceptable view of what global benefits or payroll is doing.\u00a0 It seems to me that this puts us quite a bit further ahead of where we are now.<\/p>\n
Listen, I know that HR has some place in Big Data at some point in the future, but the reality is that the current use cases for Big Data are so few and far between, and that we have so many other data projects to work on that we should continue investing in the current report and analytics projects.\u00a0 Big Data will come back our way in a few years.<\/p>\n
As I said, my wife usually wins the arguments.\u00a0 We end up buying a car that has 175 horses under the hood, and I end up wishing we had more once a year.\u00a0 But inevitably, automakers seem to up the game every few model years and come 5 years down the road, that same car model how has 195 horses.\u00a0 If I just wait long enough, those extra horses in the engine just become standard.<\/p>\n
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