Why does IT take forever to respond to your data request?
Below is a typical scenario for an HR data request that you send over to your IT department, who, after all, maintains your HRIS system.
The request
Your company leadership wants to know how many employees you currently have and how it compares to this time last year, and they want to know this information for their Friday executive meeting. It’s Monday.
Of course, while you have the current list of employees in a spreadsheet somewhere, you need to go to IT to see if they can pull the full list of employees you had last year.
Enter Bob…from IT
With a bit of dread, you e-mail Bob, your contact in IT. You ask him if he can get that employee list for you.
It’s now Wednesday and he still hasn’t responded so you give him a call.
“Hey Bob! Did you receive that request I sent you?”
“Remind me again what that was for?”
“I need the list of employees from Q3 of last year. Our VPs have a meeting on Friday and want to know if our workforce has grown.”
“Oh yea, that shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll get that to you soon.”
“Do you think you could get it to me by COB? I need a little time to analyze the data.”
“Sure, I think I can get to it by then.”
“Thanks Bob!”
The scramble
It’s now Thursday afternoon and you finally get the data from Bob.
You scramble to put together the analysis and you send it up to your leadership at 7 PM on Thursday night. You’re irritated you have to work late because Bob didn’t send you the data on time.
The follow up request
At the Friday meeting, the executives were satisfied with the overall picture, which has shown your workforce has grown 10% (in line with your recruiting goals) but they specifically want to know about their engineering workforce.
Unfortunately, the job type wasn’t included in the data you received from Bob.
Doh!
“Hey Bob…”
Why did this happen?
IT is often misunderstood by the rest of the organization. Because they’re viewed as “technical,” they’ll get requests from anyone about anything vaguely technical or quantitative. In addition to their primary responsibilities (keeping the company network online, ensuring database systems are functioning and updating, etc.), they have to field requests that can come from any department in the organization against which they have to balance their own priorities.
This means that what you view as a straightforward request for HR data gets tacked onto the bottom of their massive to-do list simply because IT has competing priorities. This can be incredibly frustrating as you often don’t have any insight into how IT prioritizes and performs its work.
This, of course, doesn’t help you as an HR pro who is responsible for providing useful and timely information to your leadership. Just like you don’t have much insight into how IT is processing your request, your leadership won’t understand why it’s taking HR so long to generate a report they need! Telling the leadership, “I’m waiting for IT to get back to me,” though it’s the truth, doesn’t sound particularly great.
You know you can deliver excellent HR reports and analyses that can help your organization, but you don’t know how to get around the bottleneck of IT.
What are your options?
If you view working this way as unacceptable, you have a few options.
1. You can hire an HR Data Analyst
2. You can hire a management consulting firm
3. You can ask IT or a third-party vendor to develop self-service reports or queries for you
4. You can work with Custom Analysis. Note, we’re a fan of this option 😉
Let’s go through each of these options one by one and assess the pros and cons
Hire an HR Data Analyst
We view this as an excellent option in many ways. The most notable benefits of hiring a good analyst are:
· The analyst can get to know the company and develop the necessary relationships to do his job well
· He will be able to spend a high percentage of his time focusing on data analysis, allowing you to focus on higher value activities
· He will become very efficient at his work, developing processes that allow him to turn around reports and products in a short amount of time
The primary downside or risk is that it is difficult to hire for this type of role.
· If it’s an entry-level analyst, you will need to spend a significant amount of time training him on various human capital analyses
· If it’s an experienced analyst, it’s very difficult to determine how good a candidate is. You can (somewhat) easily test for specific Excel skills, but can you test for that quality that drives someone to come up with a creative solution or alternative when they encounter an obstacle?
· If he is good, eventually the demand for data analytics from HR will exceed his capacity. You will have to hire more of him just to keep up! (Note: this is a nice problem to have as it proves HR is expanding its influence)
If you believe you can mitigate the downside risks listed above, we believe this is your best option. There is no substitute for having a reliable employee on your team that can respond dynamically to the organization’s needs.
Hire a management consulting firm
There are many management consulting firms that can perform the analyses you need. The typical strategy of a consulting firm is to start by recruiting generically smart people who are organized and personable. Then, they will pitch potential clients on a project (whether it’s a one-time study or help with implementation of an initiative) that is, on paper, very strategic, rational, and organized. There will almost always be a data analysis component that is useful to their clients.
Hiring a consulting firm has the following benefits:
· They will assign smart, capable, and personable people to your project
· They will spend time doing research that your team is unfamiliar with or does not have the bandwidth to complete
· Their recommendations will sound smart, impressive and potentially useful
The primary downside is consulting firms typically like to focus on projects with a defined scope. If you have a specific question you need answered, then they are perfect.
For example, if you need to know whether or not it makes it sense for you to consolidate several departments with overlapping responsibilities, a consulting firm can analyze the performance data of the departments, identify the strengths and weaknesses of each, and then provide a recommendation and implementation plan.
What they won’t do is help you with the day-to-day, ad-hoc requests that you can’t predict in advance.
At the end of the project, the consultants will leave you with a nice report but you will still be the one responding to data requests. If your company leadership asks for information unrelated or only tangentially related to the scope of the project, you’re still on your own trying to figure out how to get IT to deliver what you need in a reasonable timeframe
Build a self-serve IT solution
A tempting option for those who enjoy automation and being able to perform analyses themselves is to have IT or an IT/Software vendor build out the capability for HR to pull their own data (click once and download your data) or build out dashboards that contain the charts, tables, and data that update automatically.
This solution has the following benefits:
· You can get the data and perform the analysis quickly
· Once it’s built, you do not have to interact with Bob
· You gain much more autonomy and control over your data
Sounds great!
Of course, the trade-offs with the self-serve IT option are that you have to play the role of IT project manager while it is being developed.
· You must know exactly the type of features and data you want
· You must know how to verify the data is correct
· You have to monitor the IT personnel or company who is developing this for you
· If you hire an external vendor or software development company, they will likely try to sell you very expensive software with lots of features you don’t need that require you to fundamentally change your internal business processes
If you can mitigate those downsides, you are in good shape, particularly for recurring reports that don’t change much.
For one-off ad-hoc data requests, you guessed it, it’s back to sending Bob from IT an e-mail.
Hire Custom Analysis
Custom Analysis will work with IT and develop reports so you can focus on what you do best…using the data to make or help others make better HR decisions.
Our service is simple, once we spend some time upfront getting to know your organization, learning how you pull your data, and introducing ourselves to IT Bob, you can just e-mail Custom Analysis with a data request and we will send it back to you by the time you need it. If the product needs tweaking, just let us know and we’ll work on it until we get it just right.
By working with us, you won’t have to
· Find and train or screen your own analyst
· Spend a bunch of time up front defining project requirements
· Manage a complex IT project
We offer this service on either a month-to-month or annual subscription basis.
We know our HR Data Reporting subscription service is not right for everyone and that’s okay, we hope we provided you with enough information about your alternatives that you can continue to excel at your job as an HR Pro.
However, If you’re interested in learning more, please e-mail Dale Davidson (that’s me) at dale@custom-analysis.com or fill out the contact form below.
We’ll set up a quick phone call to discuss your needs and what the best options for your organization are, whether it is with Custom Analysis or another solution-provider.