Increasing the Business Value of Your HR Data: Integrate to Innovate

HR organizations rely on access to employee data to address regulatory requirements, support modernization projects, manage talent, and address mergers and acquisitions. However, the typical HR department has more than nine systems of record and over four hundred data elements per employee, causing many organizations to struggle to find the information they need to meet their HR business objectives. As a result of these struggles, 65% of HR professionals responded that their HR technology was inadequate or only fair at achieving its overall objectives when surveyed by Deloitte.

Why is having the right HR technology so important? Without the right technology, many companies do not have the ability to analyze and leverage people and related business data across the business, due to data that is poorly integrated, governed, or difficult to access. These data siloes can result in the following challenges:

• Lack of insight when making strategic staffing decisions
• Inability to innovate and retain talent
• Difficulty in keeping up with changing regulatory and privacy requirements
• Struggle with integration due to M&A activities

Supporting the business with Data Integration

Data integration challenges are not unique to Human Resources. In today’s environment, demand for skilled employees and the need to innovate to stay ahead of the competition, many companies are increasingly looking to HR systems data and services to support their business objectives. Below are some areas where MarkLogic is working with customers to achieve greater business value through HR:

• Deliver Strategic Staffing and HR Insights

Many IT functions, in an attempt to help HR functions quickly address administrative inefficiencies, have invested in multiple software systems and applications to enable better employee and manager self-service and HR reporting. This has resulted in a systems architecture full of disconnected technical and data silos, where consumers of HR data (e.g., HR practitioners, managers, data scientists, and developers) still struggle to easily find the data they need to manage the growing people demands of their businesses. For example, finding employees that have the skills, knowledge, interests, and availability to support short-term innovation projects can often require the time-consuming assembly of information from multiple systems or sources, forcing stretched HR staff to waste valuable time and effort.

Meeting business demands for greater organizational effectiveness starts with a reliable view of your workforce, including full-time and part-time employees, contractors, and candidates, as well as details about assignments and job requirements. Accessing a unified 360-degree view of this people data is foundational for performing analysis and building better HR applications, but getting that reliable view is a major challenge for most organizations.

• Drive Innovation

Innovation is a key goal for organizations in order to improve performance and strengthen competitive positioning against traditional and non-traditional competitors. HR practitioners can play a major role in enabling the innovation agenda by fostering greater organizational agility in people management, starting with improved alignment of business objectives and workforce resources.

Unfortunately, for many HR practitioners, obtaining a holistic view of the information needed to support business-driven innovation initiatives is a major hurdle, resulting in sub-optimal analysis, insights, and decisions. The main underlying issue is fragmented data sitting in silos inside and outside the organization, lack of data agility and challenges faced by IT in efficiently unifying that data.

• Support for Mergers and Acquisitions

Since 2000, there have been more than 790,000 mergers and acquisition (M&A) transactions announced worldwide, according to the Institute of Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances (IMAA). In 2019 alone, there were 49,849 M&A deals, or an incredible 136 on average per day. Also, consider that more than half of all M&As fail to achieve their anticipated strategic and financial objectives, and that this failure rate is often attributed to various HR-related factors, such as poor motivation, loss of key talent, diminished trust and uncertainty of long-term goals.

Every time a deal is consummated, companies must undertake the tasks of integrating the assets of the businesses. This includes all physical, digital, and people assets, and always requires systems integration. Depending on the complexity of the companies to be combined, this integration work often takes many months and can even stretch into years, delaying the projected benefits to stakeholders.

While some companies have gotten quite good at effectively integrating assets of the new companies, there are many instances where IT underestimates the integration challenge. In some cases, important data gets discarded from one or more systems. In other situations, IT maintains the systems of the merged company with plans to properly integrate over time. Most times this takes longer than anticipated or never happens – creating a nightmare scenario for IT in holding together an architecture of disparate systems containing disconnected data of different structures and formats. The ability to govern and access the data in and across these systems becomes a major challenge, often creating friction between IT and business units.

Deliver faster value from your HR data with MarkLogic Data Hub Service

Overcoming these challenges requires a data platform that enables integration of data across multiple systems and consistently deliver more reliable data to downstream operational and analytical systems.

With 10x faster data integration, secure sharing, immediate data discovery, and the simplicity of one fully integrated platform built for the cloud, MarkLogic Data Hub Service gives organizations real-time access to all of their HR data allowing for a more agile, documented and secure HR data process.

Learn More

Join us for the Human Resources Data Management: How Leading Companies Integrate to Innovate webinar on August 19, 2020. In this webinar, we will discuss some of the challenges faced by HR organizations in accessing people data and share real world examples on how MarkLogic customers are overcoming their data integration challenges to deliver digital HR services that adds value to the business. To learn more about how MarkLogic can help your organization deliver greater value from HR data, please visit our MarkLogic Data Hub Services for Human Resources site.

This article was created in collaboration with the sponsoring company and the Xtalks editorial team.