TM - November 2007 - (Page 32)

recruitment & retention assessment & evaluation compensation & benefits performance management learning & development succession planning effectiveness, which quantifies the impact of people practices and programs. Start with information needed to drive organizational performance to help sell the business case. The information also should be used by the team responsible for designing and building a solution to direct what information is tracked. Identify Delivery Needs of Your Audience Segments ships hidden in the data. Therefore, organizations should have a long-term goal to standardize on as few platforms as is practical and integrate data from these sources. Work with the appropriate representative on your cross-functional team to determine: • Whether your organization has established or plans to establish a centralized data warehouse to store all business information. If so, leverage existing investments in infrastructure to manage data, ensure its integrity and security, and facilitate its use for statistical analysis and modeling. • Whether there are analytic applications — and people who can use them — deployed in the organization. Analysis and presentation of information are most important to end users. If this infrastructure is not in place, explore the feasibility of other short- and long-term options, including service providers that specialize in extracting data from business applications, delivering analyses to clients and extending the functionality of your human resource management system’s reporting capabilities. If none of these options is practical in the short term, demonstrating some initial successes through manual efforts for pilot groups could support the business case for a longerterm technology road map. Start Small and Build on Your Successes Workforce effectiveness metrics important to an organization will vary widely based on many factors, including an organization’s vertical industry, size, culture, business goals, organizational structure and the geographic markets in which it operates. Likewise, their importance will differ within the same organization, depending on the functional role of the stakeholder. For instance, the vice president of regional sales might wish to focus on rewarding and retaining top salespeople. The COO might want to know how the senior staff members responsible for launching operations in China two years from now are progressing on their accelerated development plans. Once you determine what to measure for your key stakeholders, design delivery in a way that facilitates adoption. It must be efficient and useful. Consider: • The frequency with which these stakeholders will need new information to interpret and analyze. Does it need to be refreshed daily? Weekly? Quarterly? Annually? • The communication vehicles they use to access and share information. Are they already accessing Web-based applications through a rolebased portal? Do they heavily rely on e-mail? Are formal meetings or reports necessary to analyze data and lay out recommendations? • The form factors most likely to produce the richest insights to drive better decision making. Will high-level reports suffice? What about dashboards that highlight areas of concern and streamline interpretation and decision making? • Their place in the organizational hierarchy. What information should they be able to access? On what individuals? On what departments? Should they have access to departmentlevel information? As you address these considerations, list and classify them as “must haves” and “nice to haves.” This requirements-gathering exercise likely will help you design the solution and assist in selecting the right tools to build it. Make sure your entire crossfunctional steering committee and project team contribute to this list. Develop a TechnologyEnablement Plan If you have executive sponsorship, a cross-functional team and technology to enable initial views of workforce effectiveness measures for key pilot groups, you should be able to point to some tangible successes and lessons learned. You should not let a successful pilot go to your head, however — new and larger audiences likely will not have the level of partnership with your team as your pilot group. They will need to clearly understand, or they will not engage. Depending on your organization and your audiences’ traits, a variety of media can be used to deliver messages related to these topics: e-mail, social networks, video or text messages from senior management (change champions), payroll inserts, etc. Workforce intelligence is a growing component to strategic decision making, and it increasingly will offer HR the opportunity to be a better adviser and service provider to its internal clients. Steering committees and project teams responsible for deploying these solutions should apply these key practices. Doing so will help ensure your organization is featured in the headlines for creating shareholder value through effective human capital management, not canceling flights on unsuspecting travelers. Jason Averbook is chief executive officer and Michael Brennan is principal consultant of Knowledge Infusion. They can be reached at editor@TalentMgt.com. To enable workforce intelligence, HR must shift its attention from the transactional HCM systems it has invested in over the past 20 years toward delivering a better understanding of the patterns and relation- 32 November 2007 talent management magazine www.TalentMgt.com http://www.TalentMgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of TM - November 2007

Talent Management - November 2007 Editor's Letter Contents Letters to the Editor Human Performance Leading Edge Learning Connections Viewpoint Finding Candidates with the Right Fit Turning HR Data Into Business Intelligence Compensation Technology: Drive Higher Performance, Gain Competitive Advantage The Art and Science of Influence Training the Ethical Workforce Making the Best Managers Application: Pre-Hire Testing Drives Down Employee Turnover at Advnace Auto Parts Dashboard: The Role of Learning Business Process Outsourcing Insight: Nationwide Insurance: On Employees' Side Advertiser's Index Editorial Resources Full Potential

TM - November 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.