Developing Human Capital: Using Analytics to Plan and Optimize Your Learning and Development Investments

Foreword

I think of myself as an information management and analytics expert, not a human resources (HR) or learning expert. However, I am a sociologist by educational background, and I have frequently dabbled in HR topics—specifically in the HR analytics area. I am occasionally told that someone likes my book, Human Capital: What It Is and Why People Invest in It. I thank them graciously. The only problem is that I didn’t write that book—Thomas O. Davenport did (I have a different middle initial). But I take the fact that people attribute it to me as an indication that I have fooled some people about my human capital expertise.

In any case, in this foreword I will focus primarily on the broader trend to think more analytically about almost everything, and what that means for HR. Almost every industry is becoming more analytical these days. Retail, banking, and other consumer businesses have long been analytical, and they are becoming more so. Even the holdouts, such as the entertainment industry and business-to-business firms, are starting to make more analytical decisions. Traditional manufacturing firms have gotten the “big data” message, and are popping sensors into their “big iron” devices to measure and optimize their performance.

Virtually every business function is adopting more analytical approaches to management as well. Supply chain optimization and manufacturing quality assessment (Six Sigma) have been going on for decades. But now the softer functions are increasingly ...