Whither Workforce Analytics?

The purpose of this new online column is much the same as the one I've written for the print magazine for 15 years -- only better and even more useful. The mission is to keep you apprised of some of the latest developments in every aspect of technology used by HR departments. Often before they're widely adopted by HR.

Hopefully, it will be more useful because you'll get it at Internet speed, rather than after the rumble of the printing press and the postal truck. And better because you can react to it quickly and easily via e-mail with additional questions and suggestions for new topics. Not quite a blog, but certainly more interactive. At least, that's the plan.

Whither Workforce Analytics?

We are in Year Five and counting since the chattering classes in HR (analysts, consultants, columnists, vendor marketing executives) declared workforce analytics to be the next big thing.

Make that 23 years, if you start with the pioneering work by Jac Fitz-enz.

But corporate successes have been rare, even with widely different technology approaches to choose from. When it was independent, PeopleSoft developed a powerful but unstructured Workforce Analytics package, sold about 200 but saw only about five ever used. For four years, Oracle has been developing and promoting Daily Business Intelligence, a dashboard of completely structured pre-written analytic charts, with little more success.

Now, two vendors -- one fairly old and one pretty new -- are offering different paths down the same road. The older vendor is HumanConcepts, which, under its previous name of OrgPlus, has been selling organizational charting software for the desktop since 1986. Last week, the company announced a new version of its year-old enterprise product, positioned to visualize, model and analyze organizational structures and employee information. In short, it's not just the pyramid anymore.

Two of its more interesting features allow HR professionals to discover when everyone in the company is scheduled to retire (within their place in the organizational structure) and the head count and salaries each person is responsible for. In addition, CEO Martin Sacks points out, "companies find OrgPlus particularly useful in merging two workforces after an acquisition."

The newer vendor, People Business Network, has industry veteran Carl Keil, former CEO of Ceridian, as its acting chairman. Keil left Ceridian in 2000 and has been acting in various high-level, but short-term, roles for a variety of companies. Now, he is evangelizing PBN's workforce-alignment product and trying to widen its footprint within HR to include such functions traditionally considered analytics.

PBN's major product focus is on companies facing major workforce changes due to mergers or downsizing and on providing the information to help them make the right decisions on whom to retain, redeploy or discharge. It already has large clients in the tumultuous telecom industry -- including Lucent Technologies, Avaya, Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless, BellSouth -- plus others.

After five years, it's clearly time to stop chattering about workforce analytics and to start doing more of it. These two very different offerings may offer new ways to help.

HR Technology Columnist Bill Kutik is also co-chairman of the 9th Annual HR Technology Conference & Exposition^® in Chicago, Oct. 4 through 6. He can be reached at bkutik@earthlink.net.

January 25, 2006

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