WHY HR NEEDS ACTIONABLE ANALYTICS

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Actionable Analytics In Action

In the software industry, there’s a considerable movement toward building analytics right into the business processes of all types of applications. Workday, a provider of HR, financials, and other applications delivered in a software-as-a-service model, has made contextual reporting and actionable analytics a strong focus of both current and future products.

“It’s evolving beyond traditional BI dashboards and scorecards, to embed intelligence into the workflow and processes,” says Leighanne Levensaler, VP of HCM Strategy at Workday. “It’s about learning something, and then immediately being able to take action. You can make choices based on data in the right context.”

Consider this simple example of actionable analytics within Workday HCM: A manager has just completed performance reviews for her team, and now must make choices about merit pay increases. Using a variety of graphical options, including tables and charts, she can view current and previous performance ratings, see if an employee is on a succession slate or is a retention risk, view the pay quartile each employee falls in, as well as comp-ratio data built into Workday HCM (comp-ratio shows how each employee’s salary compares with similar jobs in the market). An instant report of that combined data will graph out the anomalies—such as person with a 1 or 2 performance ranking who falls in the bottom pay quartile, and makes 10 percent below the market rate.

The manager can then make adjustments within the system, such as execute an increase in pay for that underpaid employee, and submit it through the approval channel. From a single HR process, the manager used data to create a contextual report, took action from that report, and shared that action with others.

Workday is able to build this type of actionable analytics into all of its applications because of its technology infrastructure. At the core is the Workday Object Management Server (OMS), which uses an in-memory object model. Simply put, data is defined by objects rather than tables, which makes it possible for the system to build analytics reports quickly and “in memory” rather than have to access data from a separate report system that was updated from a transactional system. This also allows any report containing numerical data to be instantly charted in any number of graphical ways within Workday.

This integrated analytics approach avoids a lot time, effort, and cost created by a separate BI effort. When BI software is bolted on to an HR application, business terms and rules must be replicated and synched in both systems. So if a company wanted to track high-potential employees based on its own criteria, the data and rules would need to be defined in both systems just to run a report, says Paul Gustafson, Business Intelligence Product Manager at Workday. Then, the user would have to return to the HR system to take any action on a report.

“Our belief is that key to the analytics process is taking action; producing nice charts and graphs are meaningless if you can’t easily take action on the insights you’ve gained from your analysis,” Gustafson says.

Naomi Bloom, a leading HR consultant, is a big believer in embedding analytics within core HR applications, and that in-memory technology provides the necessary foundation. In a recent blog, Bloom cites at least 20 ways to make the case for what she calls “embedded intelligence,” including cost savings, improved user satisfaction, and “increased business literacy for better decision making.”

“If your production data is not available, it’s hard to have embedded or actionable analytics happening right there,” said Bloom in an interview. “If I have to create an analytics database that is structured differently or accessed differently, it’s hard to embed access to that data right into the flow of the process. It’s not cost effective, and you run into technical limitations. But when everything is in memory all the time, and operating at in-memory speed, it’s a whole lot easier to do things on the fly.”