Maybe it is just me, but I have seen a rather sudden increase in articles, books and conferences on analytics.

Could it be that, as the walrus said, “The time has come to speak of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, and what’s so fascinating about these analytics things?” With apologies to Lewis Carroll, has analytics’ time finally come?

Reactive vs. Proactive Decision Making

A recent paper titled “Real Analytics for Real Business” was published by SAS Institute on the concept of analytics as a competitive action. As competitive analysis increases in sophistication, the degree of intelligence available to management rises rapidly. Managers can answer questions such as: what if these trends continue, why is this happening and what actions are needed, and what exactly is the problem?

Gradually, value is added to the decision making that must follow. However, when statistical analysis is introduced to ask why something is happening, the degree of intelligence begins to increase exponentially, which shows the best that can happen. At this point, management has a solid foundation on which to make strategic talent decisions.

Jeanne Harris, co-author of Competing on Analytics, said, “The key for CIOs is to think long term and enterprise-wide about how they’re going to capture, cleanse, manipulate, analyze and present data across the enterprise, to ensure there’s a common version of the truth. Then business managers can focus on the insights they’ve gained from the data, rather than arguing over whose data and analysis is correct.”

Reread that statement and substitute CHRO for CIO. What if HR started thinking like that about the wealth of data that passes through its processes to hire, pay, develop and support the enterprise’s human capital? Wouldn’t that go a long way toward winning HR a seat at the proverbial table? Isn’t it about time that HR graduated from the kindergarten metrics of numbers of people hired, trained and retained to something more useful to the C-level?

Once the CIOs get their act together and make the move from building databases to offering intelligence, they are going to look around for new worlds to conquer. Guess where the next fertile ground is? Wouldn’t CFOs like to have more robust data on human capital costs and returns? They would, and sooner rather than later, they are going to notice how much money they are spending on people and how little they know about what they’re getting in return.