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

CHAPTER 4

It’s All about the Data

“In God we trust; all others must bring data.”

—W. Edwards Deming1

When many of the theories and paradigms that govern measurement were developed, computer size was measured in kilobytes, rather than gigabytes. When Kirkpatrick was laying out his famous four levels of measurement and NASA was launching the Apollo missions, IBM’s high-end computers had only 8M of memory.2 Compare that to your smartphone today. Advances in technology and increases in computing power have brought with them an unprecedented avalanche of data. The problem now is to find the needle you want in the haystack of data, cultivate the expertise and the political will to gain access to data, tie them together, and extract useful intelligence. Data are the very core of your analytics initiative. Do you have the information you need? How do you handle it when you get it? What if you can’t find what you were looking for? What issues surround the politics, the ethics, and the strategy?

For a successful measurement initiative, you will want to draw data from two or three, or perhaps more, major sources around the organization. The type of data you need comes out of the alignment process. Your stakeholders and measurement plan will help you identify the appropriate sources. Here are some common examples:

• Operations
• Compensation
• Customer service
• Human resources information systems (HRIS)
• Learning management systems (LMS)
• Social media and nontraditional learning systems
• Engagement ...