HR ANALYTICS

Singapore - In a rapidly changing economic climate, companies will need to better understand their workforce. This will create a demand for comprehensive business intelligence (BI) solutions that will be able to analyse multiple data dimensions and metrics, says Tim Darton, general manager of human capital management solutions,of Oracle Corporation Asia Pacific.

Currently, the different areas of HR all require different metrics, says Darton. While recruiters would be interested in analysing the time needed to fill positions and its cost effectiveness of the recruitment source, compensation managers would be interested in compensation analyses and how people's pay relates to the performance and targets.

However, there are current inefficiencies with the current state of HR analytics, as many companies still use HR systems to process transactions or run reports focused on one single data dimension.

"These [inefficiencies] exist largely because although transactional databases are structured to perform transactions efficiently, their structure does not lend itself to multi-dimensional data analysis. To manage this, organisations should consider implementing a BI (business intelligence) solution and start to use the wealth of data contained in HR systems for strategic decisions as well as transactional processes," he says.

In order to be truly effective, Darton provides two suggestions for companies to follow:

a. Employ a comprehensive BI solution that analyses multiple data dimensions and metrics. This enables HR offices and line managers to have a holistic view of HR data. A recent study by CedarCrestone shows that those organisations with more than the average BI applications in place have higher sales growth.

b. Integrating analytics at the point of transaction. By this, I mean make context-sensitive analytical data available at the time a transaction is being undertaken (thus preventing the need to refer to or run external reports). Example: if a manager is processing an increase in compensation he should be able to see how the person receiving the increase compares to the rest of his team or peer-group; what his performance looks like, and; and how the proposed increase compares to a market-survey of peers. This should all be available graphically and at the time the transaction is being undertaken.

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