Boosting HR with BI

I read an online article stating that more and more is expected from Information management. Crunching numbers, drawing reports and graphs are no longer enough to earn my keep. Having a answer for the question, “How many vacant post are there in the organisation?”, is no longer sufficient. I need to answer questions that dispels uncertainty like, “Who is the high risk employee most likely to leave the company?”, in order for the Human Resources Executive to formulate preventative interventions timeously. Fortunately the technology is advancing in the business intelligence space where such answers becomes possible and more reliable.

Business Intelligence must give an HR practitioner the ability to programmatically look for patterns based on a well founded logic and understanding of the Human Resource environment.  The key word that seems to be driving the use of business intelligence in Human Resources is “Evidence-Based HR”; an approach that tries to use actual data to understand the link between Human Resources strategies and business objectives and outcomes.  HR driven analytics starts with a business problem, followed by a hypothesis and then the identification and analysis of data in order to either support or reject the hypothesis. The challenge of Business intelligence is self-service tools in the hands of HR practitioners to enable them to rapidly draw up a hypothesis, test the hypothesis and maintain a record of the hypothesis tested.  This ability to put business intelligence in the hands of a human resources practitioner is probably the biggest challenge for me, if I want to realise any benefit from business intelligence. Business intelligence simply cannot be an information technology solution but must be integrated into the world of a modern day knowledge worker. Business intelligence can provide the critical insights needed for Evidence-Based HR, but it still needs somebody to interpret the results and make a decision. Visualisation must allow me to look at a problem space in a variety of ways and tell the stories of the people in the organisation in order to facilitate that decision-making.

My question is how do I support the Human Resources Executive in adopting business intelligence to support Evidence-Based HR? Business intelligence can assist in managing absenteeism, identifying competency gaps, improve recruitment success etc.  The search can however be broadened beyond HR systems and HR data to understand and track employee behaviour patterns across all information systems used including email, document management systems, intranet etc.  The Human Resources Executive can no longer just rely on HR systems but can draw inferences from across all electronic human interactions. The business intelligence system should link across system analytics with people analytics.

As with any project of this nature it is important to understand the sources of information available, the quality of that information and the ability to relate different sources of information with each other. I need to demonstrate how business intelligence can be applied without a need for complex technical skills. I must understand the specific objectives and preferences of the Human Resources Executive. Not all people uses information in the same way and the business intelligence solutions must be flexible enough to support the type of information processing that is appropriate to the specific person in question as well as the specific environment in which he operates.

I would like to investigate further how to integrate business intelligence better with the world of Human resources in order to extract maximum value from such a partnership.