Guest post by Ross Melbourne.

This week at our WISDOM 2012 Conference in Dallas, we invited a select group of analysts and business leaders to see a preview of the latest version of our workforce analytics solution, Aquire InSight 3.0.

Not only did we show off InSight 3.0’s most exciting new features, we gave those attendees an opportunity to give us some great feedback on the application—feedback that we’ll take into account before InSight 3.0 is released. More »

Do you know what the first step is in creating a strategic workforce plan?  Where would you find the numbers to back up your plan? How would you sell your plan to the key decision maker in your organization?

We have been answering these questions and many more at the WISDOM 2012 Conference in Dallas this week. During my keynote address yesterday morning, I set the stage for HR professionals and executives to learn how to gain a competitive edge in their business with data-driven strategic workforce planning. I believe that the way we structured WISDOM 2012 to approach workforce planning is unique in that Aquire understands that people cannot be industrialized.

Thanks to industrialization and information technology, HR departments categorize employees as resources. However, as I mentioned in my keynote address: “People are your only sentient resource.” More »

If you give a mouse a cookie…he will ask for…

It is an amazing children’s book and every one of you with kids under 16 have read it.

This is also a great management story. If you give a manager a metric, she is going to want to another one to go with it.  So, if you give her a total headcount, she is going to want it segmented by location. Once she has it segmented by location, she is going to want to filter it by key performers. If you give her key performers, she is going to want to know the history of their career path, where they were hired from, and how many of their co-key performers have already left the company and why.  When she has all those metrics, she is going to want to know the trends of key performers over the last five years and why they all report to so that she understand where they fit in the organization. More »

Today Sheryl Sandberg made news by admitting that she leaves the office at 5:30 in the evening.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/16/opinion/stone-leave-work-day/index.html?hpt=hp_c3

The article is a good, fair piece.  But the challenge I have is that it doesn’t go far enough.  Working 9 – 5:30  should not be considered flexible hours.  This is what should be the normal life span of a day’s work.  It should not be the exception that you get to go home at night before everyone else is tucked in to bed.  If companies are designing deadlines and jobs to fit the “all or nothing” time commitment model, they are poor planners, poor members of their community, and their business model is broken. More »

“Having clean data and the right data is the only way you can make decisions based on the data!” began the rant of an angry HRIS professional at SAPHR “Why does every vendor in this hall except you guys brush the issue aside or throw the burden of proof and responsibility for finding a way to fix the data back on the customers!!??”

He was hot under the collar and he was right.  Workforce data is a bad issue for nearly every company on the planet of any size.  It happens when data collection tools are difficult to use. People hate them and will do as little work within them as possible.  It happens when policies change and data is not collected retroactively, so there is often large quantities of missing data.  It happens when staff turns over and training doesn’t include the importance of standardized data entry.  It happens for many reasons.

The challenge our new friend at SAPHR was angry about was that this known issue is huge and vendors don’t want to touch it with a 30 foot pool.  They want the client to clean up the data.  Aquire’s innovators have recognized this problem for nearly 2 decades and chose to do something about it a long time ago.  We know that clients need help with dirty data, missing data and inconsistent data.  So we built tools to help.

Aquire directly helps clients identify what data may be missing in their HR systems.  We have methods to systematically clean up subsets of data and provide easy to use tools to identify and distribute the data clean up that must be done manually.  When the data is visible, it is so much easier to clean up and to seek the appropriate owners for accountability to the data.

Sometimes, we have become the system of record for pieces of data, but often we are cleaning the data and then bringing it back to the system of record, shiny, new and once again useful.  We have seen the issue and helped with an enormously wide variety of talent management and HR systems.

It is critical that new systems are fed good data; that decision makers have clean data in their analytics and reports and that employees are represented in the best way when you are doing evaluations, succession planning, reorganizations or future scenario planning.  This is what it takes to make good decisions.  You owe it to the company and to the employees.  Only use clean data, so only use vendors that know what that means, care and help you do something about it!

Cheers
Lois