Optimize Your Greatest Asset -- Your People: How to Apply Analytics to Big Data to Improve Your Human Capital Investments

Chapter 5The Big Data Conundrum

Our human obsession with predicting goes back to the earliest tales of humanity; it's in our nature to want to know what's coming and attempt to control it, change it, or prepare for it. Enter computers, shaping nearly every aspect of modern life and generating reams of data about everything: from atmospheric shifts to what we buy to the precise actions of a jet engine in flight; we collect data on countless things that you probably don't even think about most of the time. This is big data. It's mindboggling to think about the amount of data generated every minute by people, machines, institutions, governments, natural processes, and the like. While people are doing extraordinary things with all of this data, we as a society haven't even begun to tap the potential of all the data we collect.

Two things come to mind when considering the big data revolution: How can we harness the power of big data, and who is privy to the data streams we personally generate? To bring the discussion down from a global level to our corner of the world in HR, these two concerns come to light in the multitude of dashboards we're all familiar with, as well as the ethical questions generating heated discussions in HR circles.

Death by Dashboard

Do you have so much data that you're completely overwhelmed to the point of being frozen in a big pile of information? This is what we like to call death by dashboard, by which we don't mean to imply that dashboards are inherently ...