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New Report Finds Enterprise-Wide Analytics Makes Workforce Analytics More Strategic

What is the key to success in workforce analytics? According to the Workforce Analytics 2006 Benchmark Report, from technology researcher Aberdeen Group, a majority of best-in-class analytics practitioners use company-wide analytics solutions.

That's one of the core findings in the new study, released at the beginning of September.

"The enterprise-wide solution offers the benefit of having more people supported by analytics," while departmental manual data extraction solutions are slow and cumbersome, says David Foster, director of Aberdeen's human capital management research and author of the report.

In addition to comprehensiveness, workforce analytic applications need to be easy to use, the study also found. "If companies find the applications cumbersome to use, they will resort to intuitive decisions—that is, they'll make a gut decision," he says.

Foster points out that ease of use applies to a variety of areas, including calculation tools and access to data. "The algorithms for massaging data need to be easily applied, and the presentation of the results needs to be easy to grasp," Foster says.

Finally, just having effective analytics technology isn't a guarantee of success. Line managers also need help in applying analytics to their needs. "They need to know what metrics to track. In order to know that, they need to know what data to capture," Foster explains.

Accordingly, analytic technology needs to come with coaching or consulting services that help the line managers to think about their data needs. "You've got to have some 'pull' for analytics," says Foster. "You can't just push it. And the pull is the right business question framed by the right metrics and the right data."

Download a copy of the Aberdeen report "WorkForce Analytics – 2006 Benchmark Report" by David Foster.

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