All organizations obtain and amass a lot of – what often seems like too much – information about employees and job applicants. Over time, the volume of this sensitive data usually reaches massive proportions. To usefully mine this data for the valuable information it holds on people and the organization, companies are adopting a variety of software applications aimed at specific HR functions – for example applicant tracking and succession planning. While these have enabled evolution in terms of process automation and information management, they have done little to help managers gain insight from this data. Data continues to be largely confined within the traditional functional silos of HR with too little of it being readily available to frontline managers, or even to staff in other HR functional areas. And even when data moves out of traditional silos, it is not easily understood by executives and day-to-day managers.

At the macro level most managers struggle to access workforce trend data to inform planning decisions and, at the individual or micro-level, decision-makers who lack an integrated view of employee data cannot easily identify high potential candidates for internal development or spot patterns of sub-standard performance. Managing talent strategically can be extraordinarily challenging unless organizations possess penetrating and timely insight concerning the precise nature and status of those assets. Obtaining such insight requires sophisticated capabilities that traditional HR information systems, whether manual or electronic, are unable to truly deliver. Most important among these are:

Ease of Use: The ability to draw and amass a diverse range of information from a variety of sources facilitates the development of applications from which management can extract deep insight. A simple, easy-to-use-and-understand front end is needed to ensure that users (both HR and line managers) will access, input and update information as appropriate. Our experience is that even HR practitioners will revert to manual approaches if an application is too time consuming or difficult to use.

Single Integrated Repository: Whether or not corporate strategy enters the equation, frontline managers and HR staff must often make decisions that require accessing and compiling information from different functional areas. In compensation planning, for example, managers need easy access to information about performance reviews, training and development, employment history, and career planning. Likewise, competency definitions should be the basis of performance reviews and job applicant assessment, while career development and learning programs should be targeted to enhancing performance against specific competency profiles. Managers with quick, easy access to all of the information they need will naturally make higher quality decisions and be more productive.

Advanced Analytical Tools: To gain meaningful workforce intelligence based on broad, diverse data sets, managers need more advanced tools – tools that enable them to mine a wealth of information and perform robust analyses without consuming inordinate time and resources. And analytics should be flexible enough for ad hoc queries.

Comprehensive Reporting: To be of value, workforce intelligence must be consolidated in easy to comprehend reports and disseminated on a timely basis to decision-makers. The ability to generate complex reports that compile data from diverse applications and present it in fast-read formats is essential. The ability to automatically generate and disseminate such reports helps insure intelligence data quickly reaches those charged with acting on it.

User-Friendly Self-Service: Enabling employees and managers to input, access, and update certain data provides organizations with significant benefits. Because no one is more familiar with personnel information than an employee and his or her manager, providing self-service access helps insure key information stays current. It also saves employees and managers the time and frustration of correcting erroneous information. As always, the quality of workforce decisions depends, in part, on the quality of information on which they are based.

In the case of performance management and career development, employees should play an active and central role in tracking performance goals, achieving development and learning milestones and planning their career paths.

In combination, these system attributes help create timely and dramatically improved workforce intelligence. Managers can frequently access in-depth information and perform sophisticated analyses on the fly rather than waiting others to retrieve and analyze data.