JoAnne Kruse, chief human resources officer, American Express Global Business Travel, said in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The importance of using big data to drive informed decision-making has become socialized across most organizations recently. While finance, marketing and other departments within a company receive customized data and analytics systems, human resources is still left with big data hand-me-downs.”
“For many human resources departments, it can be challenging to manage large amounts of diverse employee information, typically captured by different systems and providers. But data can play a key role in taking decision-making to a next level—in, for example, planning for investments in employee programs, benefit options, and managing information and employee behavior to lower call center support costs.”
Kruse further stated that performance management is one area of promise that could be enabled by more customized tools. With data driven systems, it is possible to continuously integrate data and provide feedback to employees in a much more dynamic way, creating a performance process instead of the performance evaluations that traditionally only occur once or twice a year. She certainly gets my vote on this. In my book, Turning Good People Into Top Talent, I devote a chapter to “Coach-based Management” and describe a Positive Performance Process, which managers can do real time when it can have to greatest impact on performance improvement.