Who should ‘own’ data and decisions?

Seventy-nine percent of corporate strategists said that technologies such as analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation will be critical to their success over the next two years.

On average, strategists said that 50% of strategic planning and execution activities could be partially or fully automated; currently only 15% are, found a Gartner survey of 200 corporate strategy leaders in North America, Western Europe, Asia/Pacific, and Australia/New Zealand.

While there’s increasing recognition within organisations that HR leaders have a vital role to play in strategic planning, there are huge gains to be made in this by harnessing the use of analytics, according to associate professor Bernard Walker, leadership and HR specialist at the University of Canterbury.

“Data is power,” he says, and incorporating the information that analytics can provide means HR can bring an even stronger presence to the table in terms of strategy - but it’s something that’s not being exploited to its full capabilities.

This need to grasp analytics goes beyond just keeping tabs on economic indicators such as export trends or rising interest rates, says Walker, especially with the use of AI becoming more prominent. This is especially the case in HR, he notes.

“As AI is shaping up to radically change most business operations, the question will be which section of the senior leadership team is going to see themselves as the ‘owner’ of data and decisions?” he says.

HR can be ‘instrumental to strategy’

“In an era where data and analytics are often the powerhouse, accounting and finance have often already moved to position themselves in new, broader roles as the curators of all data, not just financial information.

“In contrast, the initial research seems to suggest that HRM has at times been lagging behind in the uptake of use of new analytics and that pattern is now likely to repeat with the greater use of AI.”

There’s plenty of scope for HR professionals to be using this to improve their presence at the table when it comes to the strategic planning of an organisation, he says.

“In a world where data is so readily available to us, HR leaders can and should be using it to facilitate an agile role where they’re instrumental to strategy. It’s far more valuable for the HR to be at the table as part of the senior management team understanding and processing the data that’s available together.”

There’s a saying that “Everything is data,” says Walker, but the reality is slightly different for businesses because they can easily get overwhelmed with data.

“It’s a case of identifying what they need to know and collecting the data relevant to that. If HR are doing their job well, then there should be some pretty clear linkages between what they’re doing in terms of training or promotion, for instance, and the actual KPIs of the overall organization.”

The emphasis on analytics within HR has become so dominant that the University of Canterbury plans to reframe its HR education programme to bring it into greater focus.

“We're going to build analytics very much as a central part of the HR program going forward, so that it will be an essential core paper, rather than an elective one,” says Walker.

Harnessing benefits of analytics in HR

Grasping the benefits from analytics helps those in HR bring to the table their literacy and understanding of the bigger issues, he says. It enables them to be proactive, contribute their perceptions or their suggestions, and demonstrate their competency.

“It comes back to where the HR people sit in the organization's hierarchy though,” says Walker. “We teach our students strategic HR, which takes into account all those things — but whether the organization they get employed in actually recognises that contribution is the bigger issue.

“You’d be naive if you weren’t looking at export trends or rising interest rates for instance as a collective senior management team, but most organizations have tons of information that they just don't know how to mine or harvest, so for a start just capturing and using that in an intelligent way can be powerful. Many HR leaders seem to admit a limited understanding of AI technology and use of analytics and the way to effectively harness its potential, but that potential is huge.”