How to realize value at speed and scale from your data platform

Lessons from “People” data that became a powerful showcase for digital transformation at IBM

Anshul Sheopuri, VP & CTO, Data and AI, HR. IBM Distinguished Engineer.

Tim Humphrey, VP, Chief Data Office

Are you spending hours reconciling data definitions or metrics for business operations? Does it take you days to generate insights across your products, financials, client and workforce data? Do security and privacy concerns make that job even more difficult?

If your answer is yes, you are not alone. A recent study cited that 30 percent of total enterprise time is spent on non-value-added tasks because of poor data quality and availability. A growing number and complexity of privacy regulations complicate these challenges even more. At IBM, we’ve launched an enterprise-wide effort to accelerate digital transformation of our “People” data across the enterprise.  We call it Workforce 360.

Our goal was to solve business problems using data across multiple sources with speed, accuracy, security, and cost-effectiveness.

We built Workforce360 as part of our unified data & AI platform that is the central source of governed data and serves as a data hub.  IBM’s internal platform provides connection across four data pillars: workforce, offerings, finance, and client to seamlessly enables business-driving insights and intelligent workflows at speed and scale. In its first 18 months, the platform generated a 10x ROI from data and AI-based transformation initiatives. 

Workforce 360 is integrating all of IBM's people data on a single platform to enable secure access and analytics faster than ever before.

1.    Workforce 360 is built on IBM’s one scalable, consumable, and secure Hybrid Cloud platform 

• Hybrid cloud platform design: Simplifies data integration and streamlines ingestion of people data from 100+ tools across the enterprise to just one.  Now, HR professionals and data scientists alike enjoy seamless, integrated access to curated enterprise data – including workforce, skills, compensation, and performance – and AI services to make the most of it.
• Dimensional data model: Ensures consistency and adherence to standards. Workforce 360 organizes source data into an integrated data model that is built around domain-data objects. Decoupling data model from data source gives us the flexibility to drive business insights while consolidating legacy repositories. 
• Granular role-based access control coupled with a state-of-the-art technology stack: Provides comprehensive security to enable storage of Sensitive Personal Information (SPI). Misuse detection is implemented across the hybrid cloud environment by default. 

2. Workforce 360 provides a user-first experience to access sensitive data for all personas 

• Streamlined access process: Simplifies the user journey with one process for requesting access to all people data which can be adjusted to reflect country-specific privacy regulations. HR and non-HR persona alike can now get access to data they need within few days, instead of weeks. 
• Flexible APIs: Enable all ingested data to be automatically available via RESTful APIs. Instead of predefining a schema, Workforce 360 APIs support a flexible query language for technical teams to use.
• Flexible AI Ops: Accelerate the creation of Workforce 360 AI solutions using IBM Watson Studio. Data scientists have access to data, sample code (Jupyter notebooks), Watson services, and an environment to run large Machine Learning models all within the platform.

3. Workforce 360 enhances speed & quality of insights from enterprise-wide data

• Fast and easy: Gives access to workforce health data 23 days earlier than before and enables analysis that, in the past, required costly data wrangling from multiple siloed reports. 
• Inner-source model for Cognos development: Empowers users to create customized reports and dashboards using IBM Cognos Analytics.  Plus, multiple teams are currently co-creating an HR-integrated Cognos framework. Each team contributes data and Cognos modeling for their domain while benefiting from work done by others.
• Business-driven insights at scale: Provide the ability to combine people data across the enterprise to surface insights that give contextual decision support.

Today, Workforce 360 hosts more than 80% of IBM people data, ingesting almost 300GB daily from 20+ sources with insights used by hundreds of thousands of IBMers. Workforce 360 serves the needs of the enterprise wherever people data is needed, not just one organization.  

Additionally, Workforce 360 has launched advanced AI solutions, such as Job Recommendation that helps nearly 200,000 IBM employees discover internal job opportunities that match their skills. 

This journey has taught us that a platform-first data strategy fit for purpose is key to realizing value at scale and speed. Built on a future-proof technology stack with sound data governance and an AI-powered toolkit, Workforce 360 is empowering IBMers everywhere to transform people data into value-driving insights.