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How can you use BI for workforce decision-making?
Greetings, I am doing some research for an article that will post on an AMEX-sponsored site for mid to enterprise level financial execs. I would love to hear your on-the ground stories about how your company (or client) has used BI/analytics to help tackle the following high-cost areas: productivity and staffing. For ex: Are layoffs best for the company now or would you be better off retraining people in strategic areas for optimal long-term value and profits? Are you recruiting in the best locations? Would contractors serve your needs better financially for the next year versus new hires? What about productivity measurement: are your people meeting goals and if not can BIT help improve productivity and the bottom line through new training and incentive programs, for instance?
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The companies I've observed and worked with that "get" BI and analytics try to make the tools that enable these functions pervasive, ubiquitous and invisible. This enables decision makers those companies to incorporate information about user behaviors into their decision-making -- and those decision makers "get" that their employees and colleagues are users, too. This all means that there's lots of information about workforce behavior available via BI and analytics solutions and processes, if they're designed and deployed to provide such information.
IT decision makers use dashboards to help to plan system capacities. Executives use them to make operational decisions. HR/workforce decision makers should work with BI and analytics tool managers to develop dashboards and reports that provide meaningful insights about relevant workforce behaviors. Behavior-related data worth watching can range from the time individuals spend surfing or trying to surf Web sites not related to work to the time and number of hand-offs required to resolve client issues. Such information is not enough to decide all workforce-related issues, but it can greatly inform such decisions.
HR and workforce decision makers should begin by asking IT what reports and dashboards are already in use and what information they deliver. Those decision makers should then look at what information they think would aid their decisions, and then work with IT to gain access to or modify existing dashboards -- and/or to create new ones -- to get the information they need and want. And all of this should be done with a sharp focus on workforce- and privacy-related laws and regulations, in concert with corporate legal counsel where possible.
The more insight available into how people spend their time, the better the decisions that can be made about how to optimize deployment of the most expensive business-critical resource at every company: its people. BI and analytics can enable greater insights, but only when selected, deployed and managed with this strategic goal in mind. Which means workforce and IT management have to start by talking with each other, something that is unfortunately still a novel concept at too many companies.
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