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Privacy Protection a Big Issue With AnalyticsHR analytics capabilities are exciting, but companies are getting ahead of themselves if they implement tools without addressing employee privacy.

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Business Information INSIGHT ON MANAGING AND USING DATA

HR Gains Mighty ToolsHuman resources personnel have long ruled over corporate operations involving payroll, benefits and training. Analytics tools may increase their power, particularly over recruiting and retaining employees.

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HR Analytics Fuels Employee Management, Retention

Strategy

Convenience-store operator Wawa and BJ’s Restaurants are using analytics tools to build strong and reliable pools of employees.

AS THE MANAGER of workforce planning and performance management at Wawa Inc., Marc Maiolino felt good about a software application that could analyze and pre-dict the performance of employees managing each of the company’s 702 convenience stores. But that wasn’t enough to impress Wawa’s operations leaders—that is, until Maiolino suggested the predictive analytics tool might actually boost individual store sales.

“They said, ‘You can do what?’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘We have a model that says assistant general managers that have these particular [character] traits and approach to the business … they will increase food-service sales by four [percentage] points.’ ”

But tying employee behavior patterns to increased sales was only part of what could be done with human re-sources metrics and analytics from SAP’s SuccessFactors cloud-based HR system in tandem with software from

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Talent Analytics. Maiolino pointed out to operations management that the company might also be able to hire store managers who are skilled at lowering turnover rates among workers and reducing merchandising costs.

“When you walk into the room with those kinds of facts and data, you are going to get their attention,” he said during a session at the HR Technology Conference & Exposition in Las Vegas in October 2015.

Wawa, headquartered in Wawa, Pa., is among a number of companies wielding predictive software that uses HR metrics and analytics to identify employees who might leave the company and propose strategies to retain them.

Industry analysts say HR analytics, or talent analytics, is providing sophisticated information that was unattain-able just a few years ago. It empowers HR leaders to play a more strategic role in recruiting and retaining employ-ees instead of simply overseeing employee head counts and transactions, such as employee benefit enrollments, payroll processing and terminations.

According to Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constella-tion Research, HR metrics and analytics can provide an-

swers to vital recruiting questions: “Who is the best candidate for a particular job opening? Who are

the most sought-after candidates that should be called early in the interview process? What are the chances a candidate would accept the invitation to an interview and later accept an offer?”

Mueller said that what he called “true analytics” tech-nologies—which many vendors use mostly for talent management—can take an action, make a recommen-dation and learn from users as they interact with the software. An example of a true analytics tool, he noted, is Workday Inc.’s Talent Insights application, which can analyze the flight-risk potential of a company’s top per-formers and recommend methods to retain them.

The Workday predictive analytics tool works similarly to the way Netflix recommends a movie to a user, said Leighanne Levensaler, Workday’s senior vice president of products. Speaking at the HR Technology Conference, she said the software can learn from previous successful promotions at a company and, based on analysis of that information, devise and propose job changes or advance-ment opportunities to employees who might be consider-ing leaving the company.

Mueller also brought up Visier Inc.’s Workforce Plan-ning. With that tool, he explained, Visier is “pushing workforce analytics as part of workforce planning.” The tool can provide current and projected workforce costs, and it integrates with the vendor’s Visier Workforce Ana-lytics software.

The workforce planning tool is aimed at allowing HR to obtain real-time data and other input from business leaders, find trends and connect needs for talent to

MARC MAIOLINO, manager of workforce planning and performance management at Wawa, convinced his company’s leaders that predictive analytics can help retain workers and may boost store sales.

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business priorities while also exploring workforce sce-narios, according to a presentation by Dave Weisbeck, chief strategy officer for Visier, at the HR Tech event.

Career PlanningBJ’s Restaurants Inc., which operates 171 casual-dining locations in 22 states, uses cloud-based Cornerstone

OnDemand software to produce what the company calls career planning reports to rate managers’ performance as well as their potential for promotion, willingness to relocate and risk of leaving, according to Jeannine Loy, director of talent development at BJ’s. For example, if the report on a dining room manager indicates a willing-ness to relocate and BJ’s sees an eventual need to fill a

CASUAL-DINING OPERATOR BJ’s Restaurants Inc. needs to

ensure it has the talent to support its planned growth.

So the company uses cloud-based Cornerstone OnDe-

mand software to analyze real-time data on the per-

formance of its restaurant managers and build a talent

pipeline. Strategic hiring is an important use of the soft-

ware, said Jeannine Loy, director of talent development

at BJ’s, which is based in Huntington Beach, Calif., and

has restaurants in 22 states.

“Considering we are moving into new markets, we

want to create a pipeline for a minimum of 12 months

out,” she explained. “We are planning who will be man-

agers in the third and fourth quarters of [this] year.

When we transfer [a manager to another location], we

want to know who will be ready to backfill.”

BJ’s places a high priority on promoting from within

and retaining top employees. With more than 1,000

managers and corporate executives, the company uses

Cornerstone OnDemand for yearly performance ratings,

learning and succession planning—three areas of mea-

surement that are tightly connected, Loy said. BJ’s went

live with performance management in 2012, learning in

2013 and succession planning in 2014.

The software provides visibility on manager perfor-

mance, willingness to relocate and potential flight risk.

If a certain top performer is found to have a high risk

of leaving the company, then leaders can do further re-

search to see how they can retain that employee and en-

sure advancement within the company, Loy explained.

And, in addition to targeting top-performing managers

for promotion, the software can identify low performers

and offer them further training. n

BJ’s Restaurants Builds Talent Pipeline

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higher-level position in another location, then the com-pany can place the manager on a path to promotion in time to fill that position, she explained, adding that BJ’s, headquartered in Huntington Beach, Calif., offers career advancement training programs to assist employees.

Before Cornerstone OnDemand, BJ’s used Microsoft Excel to track employee performance, training and pro-motions, but the information often was outdated by the time HR executives met to discuss the talent pipeline, Loy said. Cornerstone OnDemand helps ensure that managers have completed mandatory training courses and company documents. A report can be run from the software to see which managers have completed the courses and documents—and which haven’t.

Brent Skinner, an HR and workforce management analyst at Nucleus Research, said HR analytics can play an important role in employee education and training. For example, cloud talent management provider Skillsoft recently deployed a learning application for customer mobile devices that tracks user activities and, based on that data, recommends training and education courses, according to research from Nucleus.

Skinner said the best HR analytics is in real-time and integrates basic employee data such as worker hours, attendance, payroll and benefits administration with software that tracks corporate sales, inventory and supply chains. When this type of integration exists, a software system can push information to the people who need it most when they need it most, he added. Businesses can make timely decisions, for example, on staffing levels or

health insurance costs and possible noncompliance pen-alties associated with the Affordable Care Act, he said, adding that analytics and metrics tools like UltiPro from Ultimate Software can help companies manage the fed-eral healthcare law.

Keeping Skilled WorkersMany organizations are having a terrible time keeping skilled employees in areas such as data security and enterprise applications, according to Marc Cecere, an analyst at Forrester Research. HR analytics, he noted, is most useful for finding top candidates and retaining employees.

“[Companies] need to know at the very least which people are likely to be leaving and what kinds of actions they can take to motivate them to stay,” he said.

For example, Catalyst DevWorks uses its own people analytics tool to acquire programming talent for clients, and IBM’s Kenexa software can help companies retain key employees. Cecere cited the ability of HR analytics to interpret quantitative unstructured data from sources such as social media, employment interviews and per-formance reviews in combination with structured data

JEANNINE LOY, director of talent development at BJ’s Restaurants, uses Cornerstone OnDemand software to make strategic hiring decisions.

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that’s housed in a database and details employee compen-sation and tenure at a company.

In the case of Wawa, SAP helped the convenience- store and gas-station operator connect SAP predictive engines to the company’s data stored in the SuccessFac-tors Workforce Analytics database. In conjunction with Talent Analytics, SAP then ran predictive explorations across three key areas for Wawa—employee flight risk, manager performance and career paths. For flight risk, Wawa found there was a strong correlation between turnover rate and the hours an employee worked, said Maiolino. Interestingly, the amount of hours worked was

a greater indicator of flight than the age of employees or the community where they worked.

The data showed that the average tenure for retail workers at Wawa stores was three years. However, 57% of the workers who left the company were on the job less than a year. Initially, convenience-store managers kept hours down because the jobs can be tough and they wanted to avoid overwhelming new hires. In that spirit, the company’s practice dictated that new hires work just one day a week to start, with their hours gradually in-creasing over time.

SAP helped Wawa drill more deeply into the data,

Wawa Flight RiskTo pinpoint the reasons new hires

were leaving, Wawa used SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics,

which found that hours worked was a far greater influencer

than age, tenure and store location.

HR Tech 201520 © 2014 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

Findings

Model: Associate Turnover

The larger the bar, the stronger the variable’s influence on the target

(= leavers)

Hours Worked

Age

Org Tenure

Position Tenure

City

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looking at all employees who quit within the first 90 days of their hire date during 2014. The analysis showed that the likelihood of an employee remaining for at least a year noticeably increased after 39 days.

Armed with that data, “We said, ‘OK, what can we do to engage the associates through those first 39 days so they stick around?’ Every associate that stays up to a year, we win. A lot of [hiring] costs go down because we re-duce that first-year turnover,” Maiolino explained.

Further analysis showed that many of the store work-ers left soon after being hired when they worked only seven to 16 hours a week early in their employment, but the likelihood of them remaining on the job dramatically rose when they worked at least 23 hours a week. This finding in particular helped prompt managers to con-sider giving new workers more hours early in their ten-ure, increasing the likelihood of them staying beyond 90 days, Maiolino said.

Measuring Employee CharacterIn a separate analysis involving HR metrics and analytics at Wawa, 500 assistant general managers took a survey prepared by Talent Analytics. The survey was designed to reveal certain character traits that could be used in hiring, transferring and promoting people, said Anastasia Ellerby, vice president of product strategy for SuccessFac-tors, during an HR Tech session.

SAP brought the survey results into SAP Workforce

Analytics and compared them to reviews of high and low performers and Wawa’s key job performance indicators for assistant GMs at its stores. Performance indicators in-cluded reducing operating costs, cutting overtime hours and lowering merchandising costs. Using the SAP predic-tive engine, certain character traits—such as leadership, personality and attention to detail—were identified as keys to being a successful assistant GM.

For example, the analysis showed that an assistant general manager who increases sales in food services tends to be detail oriented; follows rules, procedures and established standards; and works at a fast pace with a strong sense of urgency. Wawa could use those results to hire assistant GMs who are best qualified to increase food-service sales at a particular store, Ellerby explained. Going forward, Wawa believes it will be able to predict which assistant GMs will likely perform well and help in-crease store sales, reduce weekly merchandise costs, cut overtime and more, she said.

Maiolino said he’s excited about the role HR analytics and metrics will play in connecting employees to the company’s plans for future growth. “It is allowing us to do strategic workforce planning,” he said, “and providing the leadership with the data to make better decisions.” n

DAN RING is the news writer for SearchFinancialApplications. Email him at [email protected].

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COMPILED BY MORIAH SARGENT

Upgrade UsAdopting the latest release of a system can take a lot of time, and some updates are risky because of potential bugs or performance lags that haven’t been discovered yet. But some users are getting impatient with companies’ cautious approaches to new versions.

How satisfied are you with the rate of new

technology adoption for your organizations’ BI,

analytics and data warehousing systems?

How satisfied are users in your organization

with the amount of time development and deployment take?

How current are the installed releases for the following software used by your organization for its BI, analytics, data integration, and data warehousing systems?

SOURCE: TDWI’S EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, ANALYTICS, AND DATA WAREHOUSING REPORTED RESULTS FROM A SURVEY OF 394 IT PROFESSIONALS AND BUSINESS USERS

n BI TOOLS

n DATA WAREHOUSE DATABASE PLATFORM

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31% 32%

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manages releases

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12%

8%

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10% very satisfied

46% somewhat satisfied

41% unsatisfied

3% don’t know

42% satisfied

55% dissatisfied

3% don’t know

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impactful changes.”The latest step in that process was deploying e-learn-

ing software from Development Dimensions Interna-tional, which is tied to the zoo’s long-standing Halogen Software performance management system. Supervisors can review employees on the skills and behaviors nec-essary to succeed in their jobs and automatically enroll them in the appropriate training class from the Develop-ment Dimensions International learning library. There are 20 courses available, each providing two hours of in-struction on leadership development, Mulligan said.

The entire performance process is done in the cloud and includes establishing goals at the start of the year;

ONE ON ONE

HR Manager Gets Roar of Approval for Data Work

ZEBRAS CAN’T CHANGE their stripes. But at the San Diego Zoo, Tim Mulligan has been focused on changing the workplace culture. As chief human resources officer at San Diego Zoo Global, the private nonprofit organization that operates the zoo, Mulligan recently implemented e-learning software to improve the leadership training programs for managers and other employees.

A change in culture, however, requires patience and ingenuity. When Mulligan joined the zoo’s HR depart-ment more than 11 years ago, performance management and goal setting had to be completed on paper, if at all. The zoo was far behind in other aspects of HR as well, including management of compensation and benefits, learning, and employee engagement.

“I was asked to scrap it all and start over,” Mulligan said. “That is what excited me about the job. I knew I had this big multiyear project in front of me. I could use all my experiences and be creative and make some

TIM MULLIGAN, chief human resources officer at San Diego Zoo Global in San Diego.

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x/y position for inside, tinted icon box

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end-of-year scoring on achievement of goals and compe-tencies by employees and their managers; and review and approval by upper-level managers and HR, Mulligan ex-plained. After that, the performance appraisal goes back to the manager and employee for sit-down interviews, compensation discussions and goal setting for the coming year. The Halogen software also is used for a required mid-year review and discussion on employees’ goals.

There were some hiccups during the software’s imple-mentation, but Mulligan said the vendor worked closely with him over the years to customize the application. For example, Halogen modified the software to ensure that three of each manager’s five goals are connected to the organization’s goals.

“I knew that our culture would not support an off-the-shelf, cookie-cutter performance management program,” noted Mulligan, who manages 18 people in the HR department. “We wanted [the application] to look and feel like the San Diego Zoo. That took some work. And as Halogen adds more and more features, I have to very smartly roll them out in the right way for our culture.”

Of the zoo’s 3,000 employees, 900 use the Halogen performance management software, including the man-agement and nonunion departments. Mulligan said he hopes to eventually move some 1,600 union employees into the system.

Changes People Believe InDonna Ronayne, vice president of marketing at Halogen Software, has known Mulligan for more than 10 years.

n Grew up in Richland, Wash.

n Father was an engineer and mother was an administra-tive aide at the Hanford Site, a former nuclear production complex.

n Received his bachelor’s degree in hotel and restaurant administration from Washington State University.

n Earned a law degree from Gonzaga University School of Law.

n Formerly practiced labor and employment law.

n Former area director of human resources for Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide.

n Father of two adopted children—a 12-year-old girl and 16-year-old boy—with partner, Sean Murphy, who manages a restaurant in San Diego.

n Co-author with Sandy Asch of Roar: How to build a resil-ient organization the world famous San Diego Zoo way, scheduled to be published this year by Highpoint Executive Publishing.

TIM MULLIGAN

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tation of Findly Talent’s applicant tracking system, or ATS; Infinium for payroll, core HR software and human resources information system, or HRIS; DynaFile for online document management; and DocuSign for new-hire paperwork. And he started the organization’s first intranet—one of its functions is to trigger online forms to help the zoo go paperless.

Since the zoo is run by its nonprofit parent, San Diego Zoo Global, Mulligan said he needs to control spending on technology and still present “a good product that we can afford.” The zoo’s cloud-based system works well, but the various systems aren’t completely integrated.

“For instance, in a perfect world, our ATS would jump right into our HRIS, and our performance management

would go right into HRIS and payroll. We are trying to make it work, but we are not there yet,” he acknowledged.

Mulligan said he believes deeply in the zoo’s mission,

which is focused on saving animal species worldwide through care and conservation and by inspiring passion for nature in its visitors. The 100-acre zoo includes 3,700 rare and endangered animals and an assemblage of more than 700,000 exotic plants. He’s also in charge of plan-ning the zoo’s centennial celebration, including a city-wide “blowout party” on May 14 in Balboa Park, which is next to the zoo.

Through it all, there’s little doubt that Mulligan is earning his stripes. —DAN RING, NEWS WRITER

Workers at the zoo were on board with the changes partly because Mulligan branded everything and made it seem cool and fun, according to Ronayne. Mulligan said he brands practically all the software with logos and catchy names that usually start with Z so the technology becomes more ingrained in the zoo’s culture.

“He understands that he is working with a diverse group of individuals, everyone from kiosk operators and people who sweep the cages to highly educated and revered animal keepers,” Ronayne noted. “He pulls peo-ple in as opposed to pushing change at them. It is very compelling.”

Two years ago, Mulligan helped brand and establish the San Diego Zoo Global Academy, created in conjunc-tion with e-learning company CypherWorx. The academy offers a series of online video courses in animal care and husbandry for animal keepers and staff. It features classes taught by experts from the San Diego Zoo as well as other zoos and has more than 100 subscribers.

The academy also provides basic courses on preparing for regulations and inspections, working safely with dan-gerous animals, managing elephants, animal nutrition, ethics and environmental requirements. Other courses cover everything workers need to know about certain an-imal species. A new class shows how zoos can end animal extinction and save species such as condors, tigers and giant pandas.

A Man With a MissionOver time, Mulligan has also helped oversee implemen-

Read more profiles of business and IT professionals.

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Data Collection Capabilities Heighten Privacy Concerns

Data Ethics

The ability of businesses to gather and analyze personal information about their employees is raising numerous moral, ethical and legal questions.

MONDELEZ INTERNATIONAL INC. knows very little about the healthcare issues of its individual employees, but the snack maker’s Castlight Health software system knows plenty. After analyzing data collected from employee Web searches and other activities on the Castlight site, the healthcare information company can send personal-ized messages to individual workers that direct them to potentially better and less expensive healthcare providers and treatments.

In 2012, one year after adopting a high-deductible medical plan for employees, Mondelez commissioned Castlight to help workers get a better handle on their healthcare choices and increasing expenses, explained Hassan Azar, the Deerfield, Ill., company’s senior direc-tor of global benefits, speaking at the HR Technology Conference & Exposition in Las Vegas last October.

Castlight is just one example of the increasingly BY DAVID ESSEX

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sophisticated human resources analytics tools that more organizations are applying to the data they collect on employees. In addition to health-related issues, com-panies can use analysis of HR information to identify and reward top performers, pinpoint deficiencies in skills, fine-tune training programs and find suitable job candidates.

These goals can be well-intentioned, but they can also conflict with an employee’s right to privacy, which raises concerns among corporate leaders, said Chris Collins, director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “What they’re worried about is this: Is the data being used ethically, is the data actually testing the right ques-tion—another big challenge—and is the data accurate?” Essentially, Collins said, corporate executives are afraid of making bad decisions because of faulty theories or in-accurate or ineffective data.

Liability ConcernsTracey Smith, president of analytics consultancy Numeri-cal Insights, said that when she spoke about HR analytics at a recent leadership conference, most of the questions from the audience were about ethics and privacy. She’s hearing similar concerns from her clients. “All of [my cli-ents] have been very conscious of the need to protect an employee’s privacy as much as possible,” Smith said.

In one case, she noted, a hospital’s finance depart-ment wanted to study a particular set of employees and their salaries, but HR was uncomfortable sharing the

information. When it became clear that precise figures weren’t needed, Smith recommended replacing each in-dividual’s salary with an amount representing their “pay band,” or median value. “This didn’t impact the results of the study and the finance department was happy to use the substituted values,” she said.

Smith pointed out that privacy issues can also arise if companies decide to study topics such as the health characteristics of employees or make decisions based on the ages of employees. And companies could run into problems if they use predictive termination models and decide not to train people who are likely to be fired or, conversely, if they use predictive models to determine who will be promoted.

John Sumser, an analyst at HR Examiner, agreed that privacy concerns and breaches are building. “You can have two pieces of disparate information that, in and of themselves, are not the disclosure of personal informa-tion, and [together they can] create disclosed personal information,” he explained.

The issues go beyond what’s legal to what’s ethical, Sumser said. “[M]y privacy is violated … when I think

(Continued on page 15)

HASSAN AZAR, senior director of global benefits at Mondelez International, noted that employees are told how their information on the company’s third-party healthcare system might be used.

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THE ENTERPRISE HEALTHCARE management platform

from San Francisco-based Castlight Health Inc. allows

companies to set up one-stop healthcare portals where

employees can research issues, find providers, make

appointments and track insurance claims. The platform

also goes a lot further.

A new Castlight Action module applies predictive an-

alytics to employee Web searches, insurance claims and

demographic data to identify segments of an employer’s

population that are prone to certain ailments. According

to Castlight, the module then sends individuals in these

segments personalized email messages suggesting

cost-effective healthcare options.

Messages also can be sent to an employee’s mobile

phone or appear on an individual’s personal Castlight

dashboard. All the while, the employee’s identity is kept

private from the employer.

“You fundamentally change the way that your em-

ployees engage in the healthcare system,” said Gary

Alpert, Castlight’s vice president of customer success,

speaking at the 2015 HR Technology Conference & Ex-

position in Las Vegas. “Not only do they start making

better choices, they also start generating a new type of

predictive data that you can use to manage your busi-

ness.” Castlight calls it mindshare data.

As an example of how the system works, Alpert cited

a common ailment, back pain, which can be costly to

treat and result in lost worker productivity. Traditionally,

Alpert said, most employers don’t learn about an em-

ployee’s back pain until at least six months after expen-

sive testing and possibly surgery have been performed.

“Now you can see data, real time, when your em-

ployee starts searching for back pain MRIs or surgery,”

he explained. “If someone is searching for back pain,

you can connect them to a high-quality digital therapist

or educate them that most back MRIs are unnecessary.”

Mental health issues can be another target for cost

savings. They affect a significant percentage of employ-

ees but tend to go undiagnosed, noted Alpert, adding

that companies often end up paying for employee as-

sistance programs that are underutilized. He said the

Castlight module can detect employee searches for

depression, anxiety and stress and possibly suggest ap-

propriate therapies to an employee. n

Predictive Analytics Shapes Healthcare Choices

GARY ALPERT, Castlight Health’s vice president of customer success, said Castlight’s system detects employee searches and advises how to address the ailments workers are researching.

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my privacy is violated, not when you think my privacy is violated. The nature of privacy is that it’s mine.”

Eyeing Workforce AnalyticsOften at the center of this controversy is workforce an-alytics, arguably the hottest segment of HR analytics as companies compete for a dwindling supply of highly skilled talent.

“The growth of cloud technology, particularly in HR, has allowed companies to track more and more data about employees and to potentially do that at a very gran-ular level,” said Brian Kelly, CEO of workforce analytics vendor Vestrics, based in Chapel Hill, N.C. “Organiza-tions may be legally able to use data on their employees, but it isn’t always ethical or moral.”

Kelly said most employees fully expect their organiza-tions to use standard types of personal information such as their date of hire and previous jobs. But the picture changes significantly when the data comes from internal portals and employee engagement tools. To address the additional privacy concerns, companies may have to ask employees to sign the same kinds of disclosure notices about third-party use that are found on popular websites, Kelly said.

He cited the example of VoloMetrix, a workforce analytics vendor acquired by Microsoft. It mines indi-viduals’ Microsoft Outlook programs for such informa-tion as the frequency of meetings and email to develop predictive models of employee turnover. While most

companies have policies notifying employees that inter-nal systems aren’t private and are subject to monitoring, Kelly said employers using workforce analytics tools might need to disclose more specifically that the data could be used in initiatives that affect hiring, firing and promotions.

Mondelez’s Azar said his company’s disclosures to em-ployees are very specific about how their information on Castlight might be used. “We do an excessive amount of education about HIPAA [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] and privacy,” he said. “We rolled out wellness programs 10 years ago and educated em-ployees about [how] we don’t get into this information, don’t want it [and] don’t care about who has what disease. We just want them to get access to the right services.” Employees are reminded several times a year that the information goes to healthcare providers and not to Mon-delez, Azar said.

Kelly feels the issue of employee privacy is so import-ant that it must be addressed at the highest levels. “Deci-sions about when and how to use data in the workforce analytics area should not be left to the VP of analytics or the CHRO [chief human resources officer],” he said.

(Continued from page 13)

JOHN SUMSER, an analyst at HR Examiner, said everyone has a threshold for what is considered a privacy breach.

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“This is a board-level discussion or a c-suite discussion.” The result should be a policy that specifies how certain

data will and won’t be used. “Once that’s set up,” noted Kelly, “generally you can use any piece of relevant em-ployee data that is produced by the employee” as part of their job.

Like HR Examiner’s Sumser, Kelly calls attention to the special risks posed by the new data that HR analyt-ics—especially predictive analytics—can create. “You are using algorithms to create a predictive flight-risk score,” he said, citing a common application of predictive analyt-ics to workforce management. When results are used to make employment decisions about individuals, the accu-racy of the calculation can come under scrutiny.

Data Aggregation DecisionsKelly said some of Vestrics’ largest or more analytics- savvy clients already have governance policies for the type and granularity of data collected, which data could be subject to analysis, at what level it will be aggregated, and when and where it will be used. Among these com-panies, predictive analytics on aggregated data is a widely used and powerful tool for identifying the causes of turnover and mapping employee skills to business plans.

It’s an entirely different thing to use the same predic-tive models, for example, on employees who are among the top 10% of sales engineers in the Northeast and tell them their long tenure, perennially improving perfor-mance-review ratings and increased time on external

websites—in other words, job sites—marks them as flight risks. “That’s sort of Big Brother, and we don’t see organi-zations going to that level,” Kelly said.

The Vestrics software provides its users with ways to manage all this personally identifiable information. For example, certain parts of individuals’ records can be en-crypted but still included in aggregated data. Discussions between users and third-party analytics providers about how to handle personally identifiable information are taking place regularly, according to Kelly.

Corporate policy combined with local laws—which vary widely—can also dictate whether certain informa-tion can be extracted. Numerical Insights’ Smith said one Fortune 500 company makes personal information avail-able for analysis, but requests for fields considered out of bounds can trigger a notification to the company’s legal department.

Experts concur that the solution often comes down to aggregating data in ways that make it useful for ana-lytics while ensuring individual privacy. For example, a healthcare provider might have analytics data that shows a 15% incidence of a particular illness. “Maybe that helps the HR department decide to put in a new health and

TRACEY SMITH, president of analytics consultancy Numerical Insights, recommended that a client looking to analyze data replace employees’ salaries with a “pay band” to protect individuals’ privacy.

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wellness activity or a program that helps address what they didn’t realize was a larger health problem,” Cornell’s Collins said.

He has seen companies increasingly try to aggregate data not at the enterprise level but at individual facilities. “If they notice that the plant or facility in Illinois has much higher health-risk issues for their data than does the plant in Seattle, then blanketing both with the exact same health and wellness intervention is just a waste of money,” he reasoned.

Smith and Kelly pointed to safety as another prom-ising application of predictive analytics in HR. When companies use aggregated data to spot a higher incidence of certain types of industrial accidents at a plant, for example, they can offer training on safety procedures to workers at that plant, benefitting both employees and employer.

Internal or External?Third-party analytics providers can create problems, ac-cording to Kelly, but they can also alleviate some of them. Employee engagement surveys, for example, are usually handled by third parties to provide the anonymity that encourages candor. Another third party such as Vestrics can then correlate the aggregated survey data with other employee data—some of it individual—and re-aggregate it to develop insights not possible when analyzing the

data separately. Often, the third party is on the hook for any recommendations that come from the data analysis, which can ease a corporation’s liability fears.

Collins, for one, doesn’t think HR analytics and busi-ness intelligence vendors and consultants can offer much help. “My sense is that the bulk of the organizations that are out there are selling snake oil,” he said.

His advice is to hire a small number of data scientists instead. If “renting” analytics from a cloud provider or consultant is necessary in the short term, choose one of the more sophisticated providers that put the customer ahead of pushing a particular software product.

“If I were a large company,” Collins said, “I would want to keep this in-house. I wouldn’t want to outsource this. This is an ongoing core capability that they’re going to want to build into the business.” n

DAVID ESSEX is an executive editor in TechTarget’s Application Development, ERP and Health IT Media Group. Email him at [email protected].

CHRIS COLLINS, director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University, thinks companies are well-served by hiring data scientists to perform analytics in-house.


Verbatim

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“ The biggest challenge for us has been [main-taining] the trustworthiness of data. One failure can turn people off, especially in the financial domain.”BIKRAM KALRA, senior director of consumer products systems at Viacom’s MTV Networks unit

“ A lack of awareness of the value that BI can bring. People are used to using Excel, and they don’t know that using BI tools instead can improve their lives a lot.”OANA GARCIA, vice president and head U.S. data steward at Allianz Global Investors

“ It’s making sure that we’re interfac-ing with our [users] and understanding their business model. They’re going to have needs—the challenge is on our side, to make the bridge.”DEWAYNE WASHINGTON, BI manager at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport

“ Trusting the results that are derived from data. In my busi-ness, decisions have been driven through the knowledge of a person rather than knowledge that comes from data.”DAVID MUNK, corporate vice president and IT service management process lead at New York Life Insurance Co.

“ No. 1 is having the data available to build reports. No. 2 is getting end users to trust that data. A lot of departments were used to manually tracking data on our [trading] platform.”DAVID HAYMAN, director of operations at financial-exchange operator TrueEx Group LLC

BI RoadblocksBusiness Information asked attendees at the BI Leadership Summit, a conference in New York co-hosted by SearchBusinessAnalytics and consultancy Eckerson Group, about the biggest challenges they face in increasing the use of business intelligence, or BI, and analytics applications inside their organizations.

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CELSO MELLO

DATA DECISIONS

Shadow Tools Light Up Corporate ITUser-oriented technology trends like self-service BI and cloud-based content management are better for IT departments than people think.

AS NEW TECHNOLOGIES infiltrate companies’ walls and transfer greater control to mainstream business users, a question keeps surfacing: Just how relevant is IT? Tech-nology and business writer Nicholas Carr asked that question more than a decade ago. But in the wake of technologies like cloud computing, mobile devices and social media, the relevance of IT departments continues to be an important issue.

New tools—from self-service business analytics to cloud-based content management—have enabled users to take the steering wheel from IT and drive the bus themselves. Self-service business intelligence, or BI, en-ables executives and marketing departments to crunch the numbers without the help of data analysts. Likewise, online file sharing and cloud enterprise content manage-ment, or ECM, tools allow workers to collaborate with

one another even when they’re out of the office. But the reality is that even when applications are busi-

ness-user-friendly, IT is still a key part of the equation. Despite Carr’s assertion that “IT doesn’t matter,” one can argue that current technology trends actually make IT departments more, not less, relevant.

Let’s further consider self-service BI and cloud ECM software, two applications that should be managed by traditional IT instead of “shadow IT” groups in business units.

Self-service analytics is about providing direct access to data so that managers and business analysts in sales, marketing and operations—in other words, departments other than IT—can gain insight into their businesses. For accurate results, though, that data must be kept clean and consistent. ECM software enables users to make changes without support from programmers and without being subject to strict controls. Although technical in nature, these tools are typically “owned” by marketing, but IT still needs to provision them, deal with data silos, ensure security and keep application performance hum-ming along.

The proliferation of diverse technologies reinforces job security for IT professionals. As companies embrace ana-lytics, digital business and social media, IT departments are best positioned to ensure that these technologies function properly and work together seamlessly and se-curely, even across data silos.

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positioned to make sure workers keep their data and con-tent protected and accurate.

A strategic part of the IT mandate is to help a company determine the risks and rewards of investing in tech-nology. That expertise is even more relevant in today’s environment, where technology is diverse, accessible and constantly changing. From their unbiased perspective, IT leaders can best determine applicability and establish the cost savings, competitive advantages and time to market of different technologies. But they also need to explain their findings in terms that executives can un-derstand. In other words, IT departments should paint a very pragmatic picture of their company’s technology landscape.

Selling a vision internally is not a traditional role for IT leaders—it doesn’t come naturally to them. They’re more accustomed to implementing projects and keeping things running—that’s their DNA. But given the rapid speed of technology advancements, IT professionals don’t have the luxury of waiting for their DNA to evolve. They must add the “strategic-vision gene” themselves—and fast.

As technology and business continue to merge, IT professionals willing to change their DNA, develop their ability to communicate with business stakeholders in simpler terms and sell their vision will go far. n

CELSO MELLO is the CIO of Reliance Home Comfort, a supplier of home heating and cooling systems throughout Canada. Email him at [email protected].

Companies may seek help from outsourcers and con-sultancies, which do certain things well but fall short when it comes to integrating the various technologies within a company. To handle this complex undertaking of seamless integration on a daily basis, companies are best served by an internal IT department that’s knowl-edgeable about the business and committed to support-ing it long term.

Data that endlessly multiplies must also be secured. Corporate executives are taking a keen interest in secu-rity because it can directly impact their companies’ brand value.

Users can sometimes stealthily introduce lightweight cloud-based ECM technologies into their companies without official IT sanction or awareness. IT depart-ments need to get in front of these back-door efforts, not to block them but rather to ensure that the software ap-plications are compliant with company and industry pol-icies and don’t cause data breaches. Again, IT is perfectly

IT expertise is even more relevant in today’s environment, where technology is diverse, accessible and constantly changing.


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Three Things You Need to Know

The Scoop on SQL on Hadoop

HADOOP GETS a lot of attention, but the big data frame-work’s entry into the IT mainstream has been slow—only 10% of respondents to a 2015 Gartner survey were using it in production applications. One of the gating factors is the complexity of programming in its companion envi-ronment, MapReduce. But emerging SQL-on-Hadoop query engines offer a potential gateway to broader Hadoop use.

Here are three key points to keep in mind about SQL-on-Hadoop tools:

SQL programmers could be the

cavalry coming to Hadoop’s res-

cue. Thus far, Hadoop has largely been the province of programmers with advanced skills writing MapReduce pro-grams in Java. There aren’t enough of those programmers to go around, and it costs a lot to hire and keep them. Integrating SQL, the standard programming language

for relational databases, with Hadoop opens it up for use by the armies of developers and data analysts that are steeped in SQL know-how and already encamped inside most organizations.

Batch jobs are no longer the only game in town. MapReduce only supports batch workloads that run on a predefined schedule. Some SQL-

on-Hadoop engines are also geared to batch processing, but others support interactive

and ad hoc queries using mainstream business intelligence, or BI, tools. That lets users do self-service BI and real-

time analytics against data in Hadoop clusters.

There are a lot of options—and

a lot to think about. More than a dozen SQL-on-Hadoop tools—

some open source, others commercial prod-ucts—are available, and their ranks continue

to grow. Most are still immature; some sup-port subsets of SQL capabilities. And because they specialize in a spectrum of different applications, prospective users need to under-stand their optimal uses before choosing one.

—JACK VAUGHAN, NEWS AND SITE EDITOR

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CRAIG STEDMAN

company is still kind of an old-school place,” said one attendee—an IT manager at a consulting firm who asked not to be identified—at the 2015 BI Leadership Summit in New York last December. Executives aren’t familiar with what BI tools can do and don’t see the value of shar-ing data that’s locked up in separate silos, he explained.

In a session at the 2015 Pacific Northwest BI Summit in Grants Pass, Ore., consultant Claudia Imhoff said sur-veys consistently find that the average level of commer-cial BI software use in organizations is hovering around 20% to 25% of workers. “And it seems like it has been for as long as I’ve been in the industry,” she sighed.

Such figures don’t necessarily take into account casual BI users—for example, execs who run analytics tools embedded in business applications without realizing what they’re doing. And not every employee in a com-pany is a viable candidate for BI software. But at the Oregon event—a gathering of consultants and BI ven-dors—Imhoff and others said the usage numbers should be higher.

That perception was also palpable at the BI Leadership Summit, which was co-hosted by TechTarget’s Search-BusinessAnalytics website and consulting company

HINDSIGHT

Don’t Wait for Them to Come to YouConvincing executives and other workers to adopt business intelligence software remains surprisingly difficult. If you aren’t selling BI’s benefits internally, that might be one reason why.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE and data analytics are widely seen as crucial contributors to effective decision making in organizations. Self-service BI tools that put analytics capabilities in the hands of business managers and work-ers are flourishing. Interactive dashboards are in, static reports out. So you might very well think that boosting adoption of BI software has become a non-issue in most companies.

But you’d be mistaken.In a lot of businesses, the BI adoption battle is still

being waged—and it’s tough going in the trenches. “My

BI managers and other proponents have to get out of their offices and in front of business execs—they need to be part evangelist.

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Dewayne Washington, BI manager at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. Washington has his team “sit where the [user] sits” so they can see how work gets done at the airport. He’s also big on things like getting together with business managers for lunch. Both types of inter-actions help him and his staffers understand business needs and how BI applications can help meet them. The face-to-face time also gives Washington an opportunity to convince users that they can benefit by moving up from Excel to more functional BI tools.

Some large companies with deep pockets invest in sep-arate teams to promote BI initiatives and help users de-velop analytics skills. But even if your organization can’t afford a so-called analytics center of excellence, don’t despair. The human touch can go a long way in spreading the BI word. n

CRAIG STEDMAN is an executive editor in TechTarget’s Business Applications and Information Management Media Group. Email him at [email protected].

Eckerson Group. I asked more than a half-dozen attend-ees about the biggest challenges they face in broadening BI adoption. Most of them were still in the early stages of deploying BI tools in their organizations, and they cited familiar foes: Excel spreadsheets, manual processes and the lack of a data-driven business culture. (You can read

some of their responses in the Verbatim feature on page 18.)

Business users, how-ever, can’t take all the blame for failing to see

the light on BI software’s potential benefits and continu-ing to lean on Excel as well as their own knowledge and intuition in making decisions. BI managers and other proponents have to get out of their offices and in front of business execs—they need to be part evangelist. Who better to make prospective users aware of what BI tools can do for them?

One of the speakers at the BI Leadership Summit was

Read more columns by Business Information editors.


http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/essentialguide/Trend-watch-Data-management-and-business-intelligence-technologies

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Business Information is a SearchDataManagement.com e-publication.

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