People Analytics@IBM

Recently, I spoke to my fellow IBMer David Green, Global Director of People Analytics Solutions, to advise on some of the benefits IBM has already derived from applying people analytics as well as described some of the Cognitive HR applications that we are piloting within the organisation. 

Q1 - ROLE, BACKGROUND & THE PEOPLE ANALYTICS TEAM AT IBM

Hi Anshul, please can you describe your role at IBM, and also how you got into people analytics

Sure, David. I am the Director of the People Analytics team at IBM Corporate Headquarters where I lead a team of analytics experts to build, accelerate and scale the impact of IBM's workforce analytics solutions across the analytics spectrum from self-serve reporting to next-generation cognitive capabilities. The team delivers significant, measurable, financial impact and works across the IBM organisation including business such as Research, Watson and the Smarter Workforce functions. Prior to this role, I led a variety of big data and cognitive initiatives at the IBM T J Watson Research Centre for over 8 years in fields like marketing, HR, financial services, food and even fashion.

Getting into this role was by sheer accident. About 7 years ago, one of our HR leaders and now CHRO, Diane Gherson, saw the potential of applying analytics to reduce employee attrition, and reached out to the Research division to partner and build a solution. Having a deep analytics background, but not in HR then, I was roped in to model the problem and build the analytics. Seeing the impact that analytics could drive in HR excited me, and I have been working in this area ever since.

Q2 - EXAMPLES OF SUCCESS

What have been some of the key achievements of the team since it was established in 2010? 

A couple of key accomplishments include:

• Reducing employee churn: Identifying patterns of attrition to identify proactively which populations to invest in to mitigate attrition risk – a win-win for IBM and for our employees. The program, called Proactive Retention has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars savings for IBM since its inception.
• Internal mobility: Helping employees find jobs within IBM through a personalised job alert engine called Blue Matching that analyses your skills, performance, location and level of expertise to help you find your next job. This solution has 40,000 voluntary employee participants with 450 job placements already to date.

Q3 - THE IMPACT OF COGNITIVE ON HR & PEOPLE ANALYTICS

There is a lot of talk about Cognitive Computing. What does this mean to you, and what does it mean for HR & Workforce Analytics practitioners?

We all know about the opportunities Big Data offers to HR – the ability for machines to crunch large amounts of employee and social data and find meaningful patterns for HR decisions. Cognitive is much more than just Big Data – it is about systems that:

• Understand context: They know that when an employee is talking about a stretch assignment, what the intent behind that question is
• Reason: They form hypotheses like “Would mentoring benefit some employees interested in a stretch assignment?” -- and are not limited by what hypotheses and biases humans have.
• Learn: They capture the digital exhaust of employees to continuously learn.

I believe that the impact of Cognitive Computing on HR will be transformational. Imagine if you had a digital assistant that stayed with you from when you first interacted with the company, helped steer your onboarding and was then your coach and guide throughout your career, knowing you and giving you unbiased advice and help on all topics that may interest you. For example, you could ask “who would be a good mentor for me?”, “what skills should I develop? How?”, or “how do other people move across Business Units?” And, if you do not get a satisfactory response, you would engage your mentor, manager or colleague, as you do now.

With Cognitive Computing, employees will be empowered with unbiased advice and have complex insights available at their fingertips - so they can make informed decisions and consult with their peers and managers on more challenging subjects where deep dialogue is essential. In this new reality, the role of the HR practitioner will evolve to one of a consultant who can nimbly leverage Cognitive solutions and add additional value where the technology has "blind spots."

In the Cognitive Era, the role of the HR practitioner will evolve to one of a consultant who can nimbly leverage Cognitive solutions and add value where the technology has 'blind spots'

Q4 - COGNITIVE HR @ IBM - SUCCESSES TO DATE

It’s certainly an exciting time to work in the people analytics space. Anshul, it would be great to understand what have you learned so far with applying cognitive to your work ? What successes have you had? What have been the key learning points?

We are at the early stages of this journey. We are building a number of Cognitive applications that provide solutions to employee problems at different stages of the employee lifecycle: 

Figure 1: IBM is building cognitive applications across the employee lifecycle

What have we learned? Some key elements of success are due to the formation of inter-disciplinary agile teams that span different Business Units, using design thinking to identify key problems to solve for the users, re-using existing tools as accelerators in the solution, and developing a 90-day MVP. We have a few early proof points:

Figure 2: IBM is already realising benefits from Cognitive HR applications

Q5 - GETTING STARTED IN PEOPLE ANALYTICS

Finally, Anshul, what advice would you give someone at the beginning of their workforce analytics journey?

If I had to distill advice to an organisation or individual looking to get started with people analytics, I’d summarise into five key points:

1. Start small and grow
2. Focus on ROI to identify where to start
3. Build interdisciplinary teams and co-create solutions with your users
4. Test rapidly with 90 day MVPs – get continuous feedback and improve
5. Be bold. It’s okay for some projects to fail.