Interview with Jeanne Harris, Global Managing Director of Information Technology Research, Accenture Institute for High Performance
JP Isson had a chance to interview Jeanne Harris, the coauthor with Tom Davenport of the well-known book Competing on Analytics (Harvard Business Review Press, 2007), as well as the October 2010 Harvard Business Review article âTalent Analytics.â
Isson: How will analytics change the HR world in the future?
Harris: In some ways, the book Moneyball [by Michael Lewis (W. W. Norton, 2004)] is really about analytics for talent management and its net impact. And that is really a good way to show people the potential analytics holds for every industry. Ironically, most companies leverage analytics in certain aspects of their business; however, HR tends to be the one they wait to look at later in the process. It just seems to me we need to be getting started earlier. But the important thing to keep in mind is this is not a one-size-fits-all situation, and all answers will vary depending on the business.
The impact of analytics will depend on your business model: If your strategy is customer intimacy, you're going to focus initially on your customers' analytics. For example, if your business is in retail, you will find that it's equally important that your employees focus on those customers, too. By setting up and managing your customer analytics, you will be able to develop insights on customer relationships and determine the best strategies for improvement.
However, these strategies will vary if you are an investment banker. Instead of your primary focus being on creating a tight relationship with your customer, you might instead want to better understand how you can quickly identify, manage, reward, and motivate your employees who do the best job of investing moneyâin other words, how you best manage your star performers.
Isson: Do you believe HR is ready to embrace People Analytics?
Harris: Companies that I have talked with about People Analytics tend to be in the very early stages of implementation. Sometimes, they themselves are not clear on what information they want to collect and how they will leverage it. This is an important issue we need to address.
Many times, HR leaders have the sense that so much of what they have to do is reporting for regulatory or legal purposes, and they want to become more of a strategic partner with the business by managing and developing the right talent needed to drive the organization forward. While they may know analytics is the vehicle for accomplishing this, oftentimes they are not exactly sure how to do so.
I think that in many organizations, there is the perception that the most interesting issues are not addressed by HR, but instead they occur in other parts of the business. This is an interesting wrinkle: As an HR professional, you don't want to try to lift away from the business, but you want to add value. It is all about striking the right balance between HR and the business. I think this really is the core issue most executives struggle with sometimes.
Isson: How can companies leverage HR analytics or People Analytics?
Harris: One of the ways HR teams are starting to get involved in analytics is through applying the customer life cycle management (CLCM) model to their own employees. This is an idea that goes back to a Competing on Analytics case study, where a company (at the time, Nextel), had used CLCM to study their own employees from the time they heard about Nextel to the time they resigned. It's about marketing and tracking your internal resources as much as you do your external ones.
Developing a model that enables you to track your candidates and new hires from the first time they hear about your company through the employee life cycle will help you keep your fingers on the proverbial pulse of your talent and enable you to better manage your retention activities. For instance, if a hiring manager has an employee who says he or she is leaving, that manager can look at the expected lifetime value of that specific employee before deciding whether or not to make a counter offer.
Companies will be successful if they manage their HR teams the same as they manage their sales or marketing teams. They can leverage the HR team as a strategic department that can provide cost-containment insights and help them best manage their overall employee life cycle, much in the same way they do ...
