Human Capital Analytics: How to Harness the Potential of Your Organization's Greatest Asset

Appendix E

Generating Soft Data from Employees

Why rely on interviews when data are available? We often rail against the subjective nature of talking to individuals, rather than looking at their behavior and performance, but we do supplement hard data with qualitative sources. Sometimes interviewing is a good way to understand a business process before a more rigorous analysis can be undertaken. There are many possible interventions to get closer to a strategic goal and many different ways of measuring whether a company is getting there. If you are new to a business or are encountering significant disagreement about the goals from your stakeholders, interviewing those who are acknowledged to be successful will help you understand the problem area, identify some interventions that are believed to be useful, and identify KPIs that are important milestones toward the goal.

Not all business processes can be investigated through statistical means. Sometimes, there are few people doing a particular job. An entire branch of computer science called expert systems is designed to construct computer systems around providing expert diagnosis and problem solving in domains where such advice is scarce, expensive, or geographically distant.1 There are a number of different interviewing techniques. The simplest, where many people often start, is the unstructured interview. An unstructured interview is simply a conversation with an expert about the domain of interest.2 It has the advantage of relatively ...