Lately I have been having a number of conversations with organizations regarding how in the past human capital analytics and reporting were often perceived as separate roles. The boundaries between these roles should not be black and white, but should be greyed, as the capacity to incorporate analytics into regular reporting cycles is achievable with the use of evolving technology.
Infohrm has been presenting projections for a few years now that highlighted that the future was to move past “Professional Reports” typically viewed as overview or scorecards into “Strategic Reports”. I will often use the term Issue Focus Reports in the same vein however the point here is that rather than focusing on a set of measures or KPI’s these reports delve deep into a single topic. The objective being able to assist business partners better understand why certain topics are important to the business as a whole and remove ambiguity from the decision making process. The tools are readily available that allow for ease of replication across the business, updating with refreshed data and automated dissemination to the desired audience.
Most organizations overlook the benefit of the integration of the analyst and reporting roles. Presently within organizations it can be seen that the role of the analyst is a wasted resource, spending time compiling reports rather analyzing the information to get to the core business issues. Issue Focus reporting incorporates HCM analytics applied to the business issues allowing for the transformation of the HR reporting role from “Service Provider” to “Business Driver”. In turn, organizations that advance their HR reporting are proven more profitable.
This new role that combines analytics and reporting should not been seen to impact the overall allocated resource time. In practice this works best where represented as a shift of the reporting function that would be spent on the creation of sophisticated strategic issue focus reports rather than scorecards. To be successful in making this transition in the workplace there is a component of change management not always easily overcome to those married to their reporting role. The good news though is by being able to mature the analysis phase of reporting this can be more readily accepted as a development opportunity.
My recommendation to organizations that are trying to become more sophisticated is that this must be a two step process. Firstly, the compilation of scorecards that have traditionally taken most of the focus from reporting team must be automated for both report building and dissemination to the business lines. Until then it will not be possible to make the second step successfully into being able to transition the reporting function to spend the necessary time in analytics and the incorporation of that into reporting.
Tags: HCM analytics, Infohrm, Scorecards, Workforce Analytics, Workforce Reporting
It’s always challenging to make this move and I sympathise with anyone in this position. It makes my head hurt just thinking about it.
I agree with you totally Darren and I think the trick is in the approach to change management. It’s hard to convince the executives that there’s much more value in the analysis if you don’t have any proof.
I found a good approach to making the move is to drip feed bits of analysis work into the KPI reports (when you get time to do it) and maybe give it a fancy title, like “Strategic Observations”. Of course the analysis needs to be very relevant to the organisation’s workforce strategies. But beware! Once you start down this path, they will see the value in it and the requests for further analysis can be overwhelming. At that point you have a case for spending some dollars in automating the KPI reports.