People Analytics For Dummies

Chapter 5

Finding Useful Insight in Differences

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding the importance of strategy

Seeing how segmentation produces better results

Getting more from data with strategy-derived segmentation

When I talk to leaders of human resources about unsuccessful early experiences with data in HR, most of the time I hear something like this: “We have lots of data, but we aren’t getting any useful insights from it.” They had been relying on the (mistaken) idea that having a lot of data at their fingertips would provide them with a lot of answers, and instead they found that the data they have simply doesn’t speak to anyone, so no one is using it. For them, the big question is this: Does the lack of useful insight from the HR data stem from the quality of the analyst, the quality of the systems they are using, or the quality of the data itself?

I suggest another way of looking at the issue. The issue may not be any of those things — the issue may be an unclear problem focus. The goal of people analytics is to produce useful insight — to see a problem in a new and different way so that you can move past the problem toward new opportunities. Getting useful insights from data ...