Everyone’s talking about business analytics and business intelligence as the way to gain insight into business performance. Software vendors are rushing to move beyond fundamental business intelligence data types like inventory and order fill rates to include newer unstructured ‘social’ data types from external sources across their whole ecosystem.

While there is business value in analyzing newer unstructured data types like social media data and customer data, Business Intelligence is an incomplete picture if it does not include information about the people that do the work.

BI Platforms Need to Include Data about The People Who Do the Work
The combination of internal and external BI data with talent data is an exciting opportunity. As Greta Roberts, CEO of Talent Analytics recently wrote, being able to understand your employees is the holy grail of predicting and preventing. The data is already there inside your organization; it simply needs to be collected and utilized to solve strategic business challenges.

For the past decade our firm, Talent Analytics Corp, has focused on measuring a single data type, namely “the people that do the work“. This is fundamentally different data from workforce or talent management data.

Rapid Data Collection Process Facilitates Rapid Insights
Talent analytics data is rapidly collected via the web into the standalone SaaS platform, Advisor. The value of talent data discovery using Advisor is the ability for line of business managers to perform quick ad hoc analyses, as opposed to waiting hours for IT.

Advisor facilitates graphing and comparison in 2 ways:

• Natively inside of our talent analytics platform, Advisor
• As an easy CSV extract or API extract into existing Business Intelligence systems for more complex analysis and predictive analytics

Analytics that provide insight about the way employees accomplish work and what they are driven by is directly tied to performance. Why do business intelligence vendors continue to ignore this area? Data collection is fast, business friendly, and the insights are strategic. It’s time to innovate and expand the social BI data conversation to include strategic talent data about the people who do the work. It’s time for BI to get personal.

Mike Kennedy is a Technical Evangelist at Talent Analytics Corp. He can be reached via mike@talentanalytics.com.