One of the most important assets companies have at their disposal are their personnel. Data and storage resources are also highly vital, but if the people handling these systems don't know how to use the tools they're given, performance management will show that jobs aren't being completed in the best way possible. Finding the right utilities may seem difficult to some organizations, but often the information they need to make these kinds of decisions is already locked away in the data they've been collecting on their own personnel.
Applying performance management analytics to existing human resources software can reveal unique trends within the workforce, as well as specific information regarding each employee. Finding a way to implement these solutions effectively to not only harness big data tools companies already own, as well as continually produce quality analytics from them, is the challenge.
Big data analytics has become a buzz term in the corporate world, with executives dreaming of stunning new insight into consumer and staff thought patterns and emotional drivers. They also imagine that these solutions will pinpoint the exact areas where they're leaking money so they can plug up the holes, and precisely where their data losses could crop up so they can stop those too. These outcomes can be achieved, certainly, as a Gartner study outlined. Companies are banking on such results, too, as a 2012 CIO study showed analytics and business intelligence are now dominating corporate IT spending.
What actually occurs in performance management analytics studies is that companies get a broad overview of what's happening in specific departments, but businesses still need to make the best use of their communication channels to ensure that engagement scores stay high. Snapshots from previous dates can give an indication of what transpired then, but there can be underlying issues that data can't expose.
The problem with generating all of these performance management analytics results is that they don't always necessarily get used. Phys.Org wrote that one of the biggest myths surrounding the importance of these data endeavors is that, once companies have spent all the time and effort on producing them, they rarely make use of the knowledge they've collected. They will review what's been discovered, but they don't change existing programs or initiate new ones to deal with problems they uncover. The source wrote that even high-ranking businesses make this error - the federal government, for instance, has more analytics software than it did 10 years ago, but it makes about the same progress with these programs as it did at the turn of the century.
Corporate performance management tools need to be in tune with business culture, picking up on issues in workflow that data might miss. These solutions can be helpful in ensuring that the right personnel is assigned to specific tasks, judging by productivity and output, and they can help target workers that are behind on training requirements and other internal procedures. They are not a replacement for human resources management, and executives should strive to understand that their systems must work in tandem, not replace one with the other.