Big Data !!! A New Horizon...

Human Resources as a function progressed from the days of holding records to compliance management and then to transactional support for business until last decade. Nevertheless, the business needs and angsts have accelerated the change for HR professionals to be a strategic partner, sharing the table for path breaking decisions and earned a respectable chair in the board. The makeover from transactional support to transformational HR activities tested the skill of HR’s understanding on business.

Bridging the needs for business success and path it took was never easy. HR professionals around the world have worked tirelessly in raising the bars in each occasion, overarching the cultural, legal and business strategies for the mutual benefit.

For some, the days have just begun for the transformational move in the organization, but for few, the stage enthused to maturity, arduous for service differentiation to attain leadership over others, making the business competitive in skill, knowledge and keep their people motivated. Thanks to the era of social networking, SaaS changed the way HRMS platforms are been managed. Impact of technology, made monotonous transactions automated.

People argue, technology removes the personal touch a HR professional must possess! I believe, the same technology could be your support, if efforts are taken to eliminate the “administrative” role. With technology and apposite use, HR can morph into role of consultants to the business, in optimizing the opportunities for business success.

Days of grouping people on demographics partake advanced into clustering based on ‘BIG DATA’. This is an art to mix science and emotions, bundled with numbers correlated with the latent factors promoting the behaviour. HR can now align policies, processes and implement people oriented programs in a manner that shapes leadership actions and behaviours thus “architecting” the shift, making their approach of being global and acting local in a standardized way. Applying decisions on strata of emotions becomes a new way of deployment rather than following the herd.

There is much to be learned, however there are few thoughtfulness on what to capture in your BIG-DATA.

Avoid overdoing which may lead to “Paralysis – Analysis”, making your excel sheets or systems to crash. Strategies or future focused measures are necessary and meaningful to help in advancing the organizations’ Mission, Vision, Values and Culture you wish to highlight with your people. Abide your analysis on the core.

Focus on measures that will have speaking outputs and outcomes. Measure what can help to improve the efficiency to make a better outcome.

Just because something can be easily quantified, it does not mean it needs to be measured. It’s easy to over measure and end-up with meaningless results. Ensure measures add value to business.

To conclude, having a people data is vital, rather starring into business success factors with No Data.

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