A brief history of people analytics

- There's actually quite an interesting history of people analytics and this will help you understand where it fits into your HR department and your IT department because if you look at the very very beginnings of organizational design and when businesses were first being formed in the 1800s there was this idea of industrial engineering and one of the most famous industrial engineers was a guy named Frederick Taylor who actually studied the motion of iron workers in an iron factory and he mathematically kept track of how much weight they were carrying as they were carrying around bolts of iron. And he found that there was an optimum weight that where if was too heavy they would carry more but they would hurt themselves, it was too light their productivity was lower. And so that was actually 200 years ago the beginnings of this idea of using data to optimize the workplace. And from that research which was done with probably pens and papers and clipboards we move to a world of employee surveys and collecting data in computers often times through applicant tracking systems or even systems like LinkedIn that look at your resume. So the companies started to develop richer and richer and richer data sets about their employees. So we've evolved from this very simple industrial model of data to looking at employees with all different types of data which crosses over into IT. When I got started as an analyst there was an analytics person in the training department, there was an analytics person in the recruiting department and there might have been an analytics person in the compensation department. Each of whom were independently looking at the data that they were managing to try to figure out what it meant. What does this learning data mean? What does this comp data mean? Now what we're basically saying in people analytics is all of that should come together into one multifunctional group that can look at the relationship between all these different types of data and the data that's coming in through IT. You're going to learn things about your company that nobody else knows. 'Cause most line managers don't know the things that you're going to find out, so you're going to discover things about the company that are very very important and very very strategic. And I think in some of the more sophisticated big companies the people analytics person or group may migrate out of HR and work in operations. Because a lot of the things you're discovering are things that affect the operational nature of the company itself not just HR.