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

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion

At the beginning of the book, we stated that HR practitioners have begun to embrace analytics at the same time that organizational leaders are demanding increasing accountability from HR. We now know that analytics has greatly improved our ability to measure the results of human capital investments through the methods and the case studies described in this book. Analytics is a complex science. When we apply it to human behavior in organizational settings, it becomes even more complex. Yet the joy of analytics is that it opens one’s eyes to a vast landscape of possibilities and that, when applied successfully, it allows for amazing insights.

Analytics promises to describe, with a high degree of probability, the behavior of people inside organizations. Now we are able to apply descriptive analytics to understand current human capital problems and prescriptive analytics to improve future outcomes from human capital investments.

Descriptive analytics tells what has happened in the past and often unveils the cause of the outcome. Predictive analytics uses past behavior to predict future outcomes, telling what is likely to happen given a stated approach. Predictive analytics requires a more sophisticated understanding of what variables we know to be correlated and when we can develop a stronger case, an argument for causation. Knowing enough about your data to argue for causation usually provides enough information to optimize your investment—understanding for whom, ...