By Spyros Stamoulis
The most effective business decisions are based on having accurate, easily accessible People Data. But for most businesses, such data is siloed across locations, departments, and divisions, having been sliced and diced by mergers and acquisitions, parsed by local users, and buffeted by periodic expansions and contractions.
Flawed People Data can compromise decision-making on key issues such as compensation benchmarking, training requirements, and regulatory compliance. And it is a persistent issue because there typically is confusion, or dissension, over who owns the data and where to start fixing it.
The first step toward improving your People Data is to acknowledge that it is not a task that can be accomplished by a single entity. It requires a collaborative effort between your IT, HR, and business unit resources—a collaboration that focuses on data simplification.
In Search of Consistency and a Common Language
The goal of any organization is to have the right people in the right place at the right time and be able to account for the cost. So consider the case of a consumer loan division of a large financial services institution we recently helped consolidate several business units.
The CFO's financial report showed the units spent $85 million in salaries during the previous year. Yet, a subsequent audit revealed the salary total was more than double that—$180 million. The problem? The two units had different definitions of "salary," with one definition excluding bonuses and payments to temporary workers and contractors.
Most large companies maintain People Data in predictable ways. A majority of information is held in corporate systems, a lesser amount resides at the division level, and residual key facts are stored with line management. Absent a cohesive plan to organize and manage this model, the data structure creates tension between the top and bottom of the organization.
Escaping this disruptive pattern requires a four-point data simplification process, which starts with having global definitions for key data elements, such a job titles, across all divisions and geographies, and eliminating data redundancy. It also means establishing a boundary between the fixed global data that drives your business and the flexible local data needed by groups on the ground. To reap the rewards of your capital investments in IT, data simplification also requires that all core systems be linked, and automatically integrated, to all users.
Taking Steps Toward Data Simplification
A plan to address your People Data challenge using the four-point process should start small with a specific pain point. Are there problems in accounting for all people costs? Have pay equity risks surfaced as an issue? Have there been challenges incorporating new staff from a merger or acquisition into your organization's systems? If there is a reasonable belief that such an issue is attributable to flawed people data, you have your data simplification pilot project.
IT must be on board for potential systems changes to address identified technical issues, and HR's role is key since it is the source of employee onboarding data, which is where accurate people data originates. The choice of a business unit partner depends on the nature of the pilot. For instance, it could be the head of the division where the pilot is to take place, or it could be the office of the CFO.
Directing the combined strengths of your Business, HR, and IT groups in a controllable pilot using the four-point process can be the basis of a new mandate for data simplicity—one that can incrementally build on successes to create a portfolio of demonstrable benefits for your organization.
Simple Data, Smart Decisions
Consistently accurate People Data improves cost management by eliminating hidden expenditures and facilitating trustworthy company-wide insights to help you make the right decisions on employing and managing talent to drive the business. Moreover, eliminating duplicate data and providing better integration reduces maintenance costs.
In short, data simplification results in wins that count across the organization. By simplifying your data, and taking charge of the processes around it, you can liberate your organization to do a wealth of things successfully.
Spyros Stamoulis is Partner, Business Transformation Practice, at Wipro Consulting Services. He is based on London and may be reached at spyros.stamoulis@wipro.com. Martin Hill is Enterprise Architect with the Human Change Management Practice at Wipro Consulting Services. He too is based in London, and may be reached at martin.hill1@wipro.com.
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