![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.strimgroup.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/STRIM-analytics1.jpg\")
<\/a>Sometime last year a Deloitte report indicated\u00a0that growth in Workforce Analytics had plateaued or was slowing, however, at the conference this week\u00a0Josh Bersin @ Deloitte suggested that over night we have\u00a0moved into the\u00a0“Tornado” on Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm diagram. \u00a0Basically, I will paraphrase Josh by\u00a0saying the long\u00a0winter is over, the birds are chirping but the\u00a0sleeping giants have awoken.<\/p>\n
Another way of putting this is that Workforce Analytics has begun the “Tipping Point” of exponential growth and\/or that we have started to\u00a0pass through the infamous “Hockey Stick” point of inflection on a growth curve. Believe me when I say the VC’s ears are perking up. Two years ago, when we presented our ideas we got blank stares. It was like presenting at the Elk’s Lodge, with less alcohol. Still, they had a point; “who is going to buy it?” We are in a\u00a0better market for entrepreneurs, but seeing this now everyone else\u00a0is rushing in too so we all experience something like a tornado\u00a0until winners and losers are sorted out.<\/p>\n
If you talk to startup entrepreneurs you get a similar picture, although if you get behind the scenes most will admit some degree of frustration with the market – they are having\u00a0difficulty connecting with buyers and budgets despite that they have made substantial advances in\u00a0technology and its possible uses within HR. Workforce Analytics Technologists look at the strange HR customer market in utter disbelief, mirroring how the HR customer looks back. These people\u00a0need us now more than ever, why aren’t they beating down a path to our door?<\/p>\n
Where are we on the curve?<\/span><\/p>\n The Deloitte report suggested growth in Workforce Analytics related titles (on job boards) + their consulting revenue was not\u00a0what would be expected on an exponential growth path, however this\u00a0vastly<\/span> underestimated internal job growth, restructuring and refocusing of staff. It is not a small thing – that may have masked at least a 10x year over year magnitude global increase in investment in Workforce Analytics, in one year. Simultaneously, we see growth at PwC, Hay, KPMG, McKinsey, STRIMgroup and the rest.\u00a0This is the nature of this space, we have no sense of the pie or each\u00a0share. Workforce Analytics related job titles in my network indicate anything less than 2x annual growth estimates are\u00a0far far far off. 2x growth per year is a more than safe bet. \u00a0For example, my network of Workforce Analytics friends have expanded by 1000 people in just over the last quarter. We are in a once in a lifetime shift in HR akin to the emergence of Finance from Accounting or Marketing from Sales. There was a time they did not exist – you can’t remember it. \u00a0It is big trend, it will have broad impact on the world, potentially every human being, and we are apart of it.<\/p>\n What\u00b4s going on regarding Workforce Analytics Technology?<\/span><\/p>\n We see a host of new services and products from names we have never heard before and we see extensions of old\u00a0services and products from all the names we have heard before. I think IBM has 12.5\u00a0different products relevant to our space. I don’t even think people who work for IBM know all their Workforce Analytics related products. Technologists\u00a0are selling to people that have day jobs and Workforce Analytics typically\u00a0has never before been\u00a0one of them – so those who\u00a0have something to sell are\u00a0on precarious path. CHROs are inclined to hire and wait. Let’s let the new guy (or gal) sort this problem out.<\/p>\n Let us talk about the demographic change in HR<\/span><\/p>\n Change takes a while to get going, plays out over decade, not always in the ways we expect, but demographics are\u00a0the most powerful force for change on earth. Similarly\u00a0change in the Workforce Analytics space has primarily been in repurposed headcount and where it comes from – The New HR pitted against the huddled old HR masses whose only remaining options are to join, resist or spout\u00a0utter non-sense. \u00a0In our political skit: Jeb Bush appears overwhelmed with\u00a0disbelief, Hillary Clinton reminds “I was like you once too”, and Donald Trump fights politically correctness with factual incorrectness. Sarah Palin is not in the race but hangs around to entertain us with poetry. With Millennials joining together with GenX\u00a0in disgust of all that is established, boomers gather in fear, and there either is or should be tear gas\u00a0everywhere. Sarah Palin, I can write poetry too.<\/p>\n Fits\u00a0and starts, a little discomfort, and then one day you wake up and think, “20 years ago\u00a0what exactly did we\u00a0do without the internet?” \u00a0Millennials, by definition, have no idea. Many of us\u00a0have already tired of email and Facebook.The Millennials response, “come on everyone, we agree, but let’s keep moving.” Wasn’t this true of every generation before them, just with different technology backdrops? Note the background images of the atomic bombs in our parents generation. I believe I caught the tail end of hiding under the desks bit at school – never mind. Maybe Snapchat and Twitter is not really all that bad after all, not negating the atomic power new ways to communicate\u00a0have.<\/p>\n Absent shared mindspace (among executives, HR and Workforce Analysts) for a dedicated budget the go to pragmatic solutions for HR is: Hire more people, training and try to leverage existing technology until we can figure out our roadmap and make the business case for\u00a0what else\u00a0we need to do this thing.<\/p>\n Lately I have had no fight in me for “Gloves Off Friday Posts” – apparently needing to recover from my brutal loss to Excel a few weeks ago. What is the current #1 business tool for analysis in the world? Excel<\/strong><\/em>. \u00a0This is not a scientific assessment, but at the conference the number of negative references to “we had to do\u00a0this in Excel” or we are “trying to get out of Excel”, were something akin to counting “ums” when I speak. “Um, there goes another one.”\u00a0 All of the successful examples of Workforce Analytics provided at the conference that I heard were stories of the journey out of Excel. The conference should have\u00a0been named: “Workforce Analytics And Your Future At Work After Excel”.<\/p>\n Could you share some numbers with us? How can we measure success?<\/span><\/p>\n In the field of Workforce Analytics, at the moment, success is found via, “we spent x years and x dollars to\u00a0get on a scalable technology architecture for Workforce Analytics workflow”. In one example provided : 2 years and 3.5 Million dollars: I appreciate the transparency. \u00a0The stories of this journey provided just at<\/span>\u00a0this conference<\/span> include: Intuit (Michelle Deneau), RackSpace\/Tesoro Corp\u00a0(Robert Lanning), McGraw Hill (Antony Ebelle-Ebanda), Gap (Anthony Walter), GE (Heather Whiteman),… but this is only a small sample. Nobody disagreed. Nobody was shocked. The story is the same everywhere – there are many more interesting things we can do, but\u00a0there is little\u00a0way around the journey \u00a0– wrapping arms around the data is a\u00a0part of the\u00a0journey. Confront the brutal facts.<\/p>\n It should be mentioned the folks that presented \u00a0are just the heros, the survivors. I appreciate Tauseef Rahman for pulling\u00a0me aside and descretely mentioning the problem of “Survivor Bias” – e.g. we do not\u00a0hear from the failures so we don’t know if they might have done the exact same things and got a different result. Survivor bias may be a problem, but unless you go looking around for skeletons you will probably never know for sure.<\/p>\n At the moment we have no real measure of success for our field. Success\u00a0is not measured in terms of speed or cost of implementing a data warehouse and reporting suite, relative to peers. That said there are real differences. Absent any other clear measure of success this might do as a proxy in the beginning. I’m anxious to see what happens with Robert Lanning in his new role at Tesoro – he has a particularly good track record.<\/p>\n It is not that Excel and other ad-hoc tools are not useful, it is just that they don’t scale with demand after you actually show people what insights it is\u00a0possible for them to get in our space. Beware of this – they never knew before how powerful this HR Analytics stuff really was – all bets are off\u00a0when\u00a0executives finally see it.<\/p>\n What about math and stats?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you do\u00a0not create a\u00a0scalable analytical architecture at the outset to meet demand in an equation like T+1 = demand^2, you will fail if you cannot increase resource^2. The math suggests this will probably occur about 1.5-2 years into the role. No worries, opportunities in the space\u00a0will\u00a0abound for some time so you will get\u00a0a second or third\u00a0chance to get it right at a clean\u00a0employer. \u00a0My learning parallels what Ian O\u00b4Keefe (next gen\u00a0Google Workforce Analytics) says, “we must work three problems simultaneously :\u00a0efficiency, effectiveness, and user experience”.In my biased, not humbly stated, opinion you must\u00a0use\u00a0technology to take basic reporting off the table, but you must\u00a0simultaneously create means to expose that data to a variety of downstream systems to support a complete analytical workflow: statistical applications for data scientists (R, SPSS, Python), niche workforce analytics applications to augment (varied), and data innovative visualization applications used\u00a0by other functions of your businesses and executives (Tableau, Domo…). If your data doesn’t join sources and port to these environments efficiently, I don’t care how good it is now, you are going to get stuck somewhere. If you are addressing the problem with people your people needs\/costs\u00a0are going to need to expand exponentially with demand. If you do not have an exponential budget (e.g. think Google) and don’t have a scalable architecture for repeatability and change, then you have real trouble.<\/p>\n Other troubles. \u00a0If you can’t\u00a0get data into high end statistics you will bore and be eventually replaced. If you can’t communicate in tomorrow’s visual frameworks you will be dismissed.<\/p>\n Thanks very much, Mike!<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few days ago I talked to Mike West. Mike has 10+ years of experience building Workforce Analytics from the ground up at\u00a0companies such as Google, Merck, PetSmart, Children’s Medical, Jawbone and other places. Mike currently is VP of Product Strategy at One Model.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[686],"tags":[283,300,707],"class_list":["post-5057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-workforce-analytics-2","tag-analytics","tag-chro","tag-workforce-analytics-en"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strimgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strimgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strimgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strimgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strimgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5057"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.strimgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5063,"href":"https:\/\/www.strimgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5057\/revisions\/5063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strimgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strimgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strimgroup.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIn effort to focus on the solution and not the technology, technologists\u00a0are pretty much all\u00a0using words now like, “insights”, “actionable”, “business outcomes”, “tell stories with data”, etc. such that without looking carefully at the details\u00a0it is difficult\u00a0to know what anyone is really doing, why they are different, and why you would go with one over another.<\/p>\n