People Analytics – Getting Interactive

In a previous post, I wrote that new tools are emerging to enhance business intelligence and people analytics that have the potential to improve success rates of data analytics projects and help lead to improved adoption rates. One-directional, static dashboards, while somewhat interesting, are often not compelling enough and are not helping move the analytics and data discussions forward.

By moving beyond traditional dashboards, organizations have the power to tell a more compelling story, in essence, creating a storyboard of information. Here are some examples of what can be done today to help improve on the standard, static non-interactive dashboard:

• Presentation: Simple data and presentation capabilities, which allow a dashboard or report to be distributed to individual, groups or teams. This facilitates knowledge transfer and information sharing. In many cases, various formats of the data, such as PDF files, can also be created for distribution, allowing greater flexibility.

• Interactive Drill-down: Within a report being viewed, users can click on virtually any field to see more detailed information. For example, a user might drill down from high-level information see more detailed intelligence on a region, agency or organizational unit. This information might include time to hire, hire quality, employee engagement data, team performance and much more.

• Collaboration: Users and groups of users can add comments, encouraging discussion and actions on report data.

• Filtering: Filters can be applied to reports, allowing users to create unique presentations for specific teams, regions, agencies or organizational units.

• Favorites: Users can add entire reports, dashboards and presentations to their list of favorites, allowing fast access to users’ favorite reports and searching.

• Tracking: Reports can be easily tracked to see how many and which users have viewed the reports.

These are the types of tools that can help HR maximize the potential of the volumes of data it has at its disposal. Correspondingly, this will help HR better tell its story and help the organization move to become a data-driven organization.

Moving people analytics beyond dashboards to an interactive exchange and collaboration of data and information helps the entire organization evolve and, finally, truly embrace analytics.