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Featured
5 min read
Phil Schrader
Analytics is a funny discipline. On one hand, we deal with idealized models of how the world works. On the other hand, we are constantly tripped up by pesky things like the real world. One of these sneaky hard things is how best to count up people at various points in time, particularly when they are liable to move around. In other words, how do you keep track of people at a given point in time, especially when you have to derive that information from a date range? Within people analytics, you run into this problem all the time. In other areas, it isn’t as big of a deal. Outside of working hours (sometimes maybe during working hours), I run into this when I’m in the middle of a spreadsheet full of NBA players. Let's explore by looking at an easy-to-reference story from 2018. Close your eyes and imagine I’m about to create an amazing calculation when I realize that I haven’t taken player trades into consideration. George Hill, for example, starts the season in Sacramento but ends it in Cleveland. How do you handle that? Extra column? Extra row? What if he had gotten traded again? Two extra columns? Ugh! My spreadsheet is ruined! Fortunately, One Model is set up for this sort of point-in-time metric. Just tell us George Hill’s effective and end dates and the corresponding metrics will be handled automatically. Given the data below, One Model would place him in the Start of Period (SOP) Headcount for Sacramento and End of Period (EOP) Headcount for Cleveland. Along the way, we could tally up the trade events. In this scenario, Sacramento records an outbound trade of Hill and Cleveland tallies an inbound trade. The trade itself would be a cumulative metric. You could ask, “How many inbound trades did Cleveland make in February?” and add them all up. Answer-- they made about a billion of them. Putting it all together, we can say that Hill counts in Cleveland’s headcount at any point in time after Feb 7. (Over that period Cleveland accumulated 4 new players through trades.) So the good news is that this is easy to manage in One Model. Team Effective Date End Date Sacramento 2017-07-10 2018-02-07 Cleveland 2018-02-08 --- The bad news is that you might not be used to looking at data this way. Generally speaking, people are pretty comfortable with cumulative metrics (How many hires did we make in January?). They may even explore how to calculate monthly headcount and are pretty comfortable with the current point in time (How many people are in my organization). However, being able to dip into any particular point in time is new. You might not have run into many point-in-time scenarios before-- or you might have run into versions that you could work around. But, there is no hiding from them in people analytics. Your ability to count employees over time is essential. Unsure how to count people over time? Never fear. We’ve got a video below walking you through some examples. If you think this point in time stuff is pretty cool, then grab a cup of coffee and check out our previous post on the Recruiting Cholesterol graph. There we continue to take a more intense look beyond monthly and yearly headcount, and continue to dive deeper into point-in-time calculations. Also, if you looked at the data above and immediately became concerned about the fact that Hill was traded sometime during the day on the 8th of February and whether his last day in Sacramento should be listed as the 7th or the 8th-- then please refer to the One Model career page. You’ll fit right in with Jamie :) Want to read more? Check out all of our People Analytics resources. About One Model: One Model provides a data management platform and comprehensive suite of people analytics directly from various HR technology platforms to measure all aspects of the employee lifecycle. Use our out-of-the-box integrations, metrics, analytics, and dashboards, or create your own. Its newest tool, One AI, integrates cutting-edge machine learning capabilities into its current platform, equipping HR professionals with readily-accessible, unparalleled insights from their people analytics data.
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Featured
1 min read
Chris Butler
One Model has announced its appointment to the Australian Government’s Digital Transformation Agency Cloud Marketplace, a digital sourcing arrangement of cloud computing offerings for Australian government. One Model’s globally recognised and award-winning People Analytics platform, is now available via the Cloud Marketplace to all Australian federal, state, and territory government agencies seeking to reimagine and accelerate their People Analytics journey. One Model delivers a comprehensive people analytics platform to business and HR leaders that integrates, models and unifies data from the myriad of HR technology solutions through the out-of-the-box metric library, storyboard visuals, and advanced analytics using a proprietary AI and machine learning model builder. People data presents unique and complex challenges which the One Model platform simplifies to enable faster, better, evidence-based workforce decisions. Many public sector departments and organisations around the world realised the power of One Model and selected One Model as their partner to success, including the Australian Department of Health, the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), and Tabcorp to name just a few. The Cloud Marketplace can be accessed via the DTA’s BuyICT platform.
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Featured
11 min read
Chris Butler
This week One Model was delighted to participate with an elite group of our industry peers in the HR Tech Alliances, Virtual Collaboration Zone - Best New People Analytics Solution competition. I'm excited to share some detail on what the judges saw to justify the outcome. This wasn't an empty competition either and had some significant companies in the field. The overall scores were as below: 1st - One Model - 4.28 2nd - activ8 intelligence 4.06 3rd - Visier - 3.93 Given how proud I am of our team for winning this award, I thought I would share our presentation. Before I do that, I would like to acknowledge how far the pure play people analytics space has come in recent time. As an industry, this is something that we should celebrate as we continue on a path of innovation to deliver better products and better outcomes for our clients. People analytics is an exciting place to be as 2020 comes to its (merciful) conclusion! We'll take a quick tour through the highlights of our presentation and demonstration. Who are we? One Model provides its customers with an end to end people analytics platform that we describe as an infrastructure. We call it an infrastructure, because from the ground up - One Model is built to make everything we do open and accessible to our most important stakeholder - you the customer. Everything from our data models to our content catalogues, right down to the underlying data warehouse is transparent and accessible. One Model is not a black box. Over the last five years, we have been guided by the principle that because of One Model’s transparency and flexibility - our customers should feel as if this is a product that they built themselves. Our History For those of you who are unfamiliar with the history of One Model, the core of our team is derived from workforce analytics pioneers InfoHRM. InfoHRM was acquired by Successfactors in 2010 and subsequently SAP in 2012. During our extraordinary ride from humble Australian business to integral part of one of the world’s largest software companies - our team learned that while our solution gave low maturity users what they needed in terms of the what, why and how of measuring their workforce. Our solution remained an inflexible tool that customers outgrew as their own capabilities increased. With an increased sophistication, customers were asking new and more complicated questions and the solution simply couldn't evolve with them. Five years later and sadly, this is what we continue to see from other vendors in our space. Meeting our customers where they are on their people analytics journey and supporting them through their evolution is fundamental to the One Model platform. Be Open; Be Flexible; Don't put a ceiling on your customers capabilities. One Model takes care of the hard work of building a people analytics infrastructure. We built One Model to take care of both low maturity users, who need simple and supported content to understand the power of people analytics. At the same time, we need to deliver an experience that customers grow into and higher maturity users can leverage world-leading One AI data science and statistical engine. Furthermore, if they want to use their own tools or external data science teams - their people analytics platform should enable this - not stand in its way. One Model’s Three Pillar People Analytics Philosophy Pillar 1: Data Orchestration People data is useless if you can’t get access to it. Data orchestration is critical to a successful people analytics program. At One Model - Data Orchestration is our SUPERPOWER! Many thousands of hours have been invested by our team in bespoke integrations that overcome the native challenges of HR Tech vendors and provide full, historic and transactional extracts ready for analytics. This isn’t easy. Actually, it’s terrifyingly hard. Let’s use Workday as an example; To put it mildly, the data from their reporting engine and the basic API used to download these reports is terrible. It's merely a snapshot that doesn't provide the transactional detail required for analytics. It's also impossible to sync history as it changes over time - an important feature given the nature of HR data. You have to go to the full API to manage a complete load for analytics. We are 25,000 hours in and we're still working on changes! To power our data orchestration, we built our own Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for managing the enormous complexity of people data and to house our data modelling tools. Data quality and validation dashboards ensure we identify and continue to monitor data over time for correction. Data destinations allow us to feed data out to other places, many of our customers use this to feed data to other vendors or push data to other business units (like finance) to keep other business units up to date. Unlike garden variety Superpowers (like flying), our data orchestration capability did not develop by serendipity or luck. It developed and continues to develop by the hard work and superior skills of our team. Pillar 2: Data Presentation Most other vendors in our space exist here. They don't provide open and flexible toolsets for Data Orchestration or Value Extraction / Data Science. When we started One Model, we hadn't planned on a visualization engine at all. We thought we could leverage a Tableau, Looker, or Birst OEM embedded in our solution. After much evaluation, we just couldn't deliver the experience and capability that analyzing and reporting on HR data requires. Generic BI tools aren't able to deliver the right calculations, with the right views across time, in a fashion that allows wide distribution according to the intense security and privacy needs of HR. We had to build our own. Ultimately our vertical integration allows unique user security modelling, integration of One AI into the frontend UI, all while not limiting us to the vagaries of someone else's product. Our implicit understanding of how HR reports, analyzes, and distributes data required us to build a HR specific data visualization tool for One Model. Pillar 3: Data Science / Value Extraction - One AI I like to describe the third pillar of our people analytics philosophy as our 'Value Extraction' layer. This layer is vertically integrated on top of our data models, it allows us to apply automated machine learning, advanced statistical modelling, and to augment and extend our data with external capabilities like commute time calculations. Predictive capabilities were our first target and we needed to build unique models at scale for any customer, regardless of their data shape, size, or quality. A one size fits all algorithm that most other vendors in the HR space provide wasn't going to cut it. Enter automated machine learning - Our One AI capability will look across the entire data scope for a customer, it will introduce external context data, select it's own features, train potentially hundreds of models and permutations of those models and select the best fit. It provides a detailed explanation of the decisions it made, enough to keep any data scientist happy. The best of all these models can be scheduled and repeated so every month it could be set to re-learn, re-train, and provide an entirely different model as a fit to your changing workforce. This unbelievable capability doesn't lock out an experienced team, but invites them in should they wish to pull their own levers and make their own decisions. The One AI engine is now being brought to bear in a real time fashion in our UI tacking forecasting, bayesian what if analyses, bias detection, anomaly detection, and insight detection. We have barely scratched the surface of the capability and our vertical integration with a clean, consistent data model allows these advanced tools to work to deliver the best outcomes to customers. Labor Market Intelligence One Model has the world’s best understanding of your internal HR data set; we do wonderful things with the data you already have - but we were missing the context of the external labor market and how that impacted our customer's workforces. As a result, we have developed a proprietary Labor Market Intelligence (LMI) tool. LMI is being released in January 2021 as a standalone product providing labor market analytics to our customers. LMI retains the functionality that you love about our people analytics platform - the ability to flexibly navigate data, build your own storyboard content, and drill through to granular detail. Importantly what LMI will allow for One Model enterprise customers is the ability to link external market data to internal people data. Delivering outcomes like identifying persons paid lower than the market rate in their region, identifying employees in roles at risk of poaching due to high market demand and turnover, and helping you understand if your talent are leaving for promotions, or lateral moves. Collaboration with the HR Tech Ecosystem Finally, One Model understands the power of collaboration in the HR Tech ecosystem. We are already working with leading consultancies like Deloitte and are embedded in HCM vendors helping consume and make sense of their own data to deliver people analytics and extract value for their customers. At the end of the day, our vision is to understand the entire HR Tech ecosystem at the data layer, to help customers realize their investment in these systems, and to provide a data insurance policy as they transition between systems. Analytics is a by-product of this vision and thankfully it also pays the bills ;)
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Featured
5 min read
Tony Ashton
In the last One Model product update post I talked about our new user experience and hinted at some exciting new developments on the horizon. In this post I want to share some more information on those future designs. Thanks again to our customers for sharing their time and collaborating with us on our UX developments and everyone in One Model, but I want to make a special mention of the powerhouse behind One Model’s product designs - Nicole Li - a true UX unicorn! While the new user experience showcases Nicole’s incredible work, the new stuff is where things get super exciting. This content is being shared to provide an insight into future product developments planned by One Model. This should not be interpreted as a commitment to deliver any particular functionality or to any defined timeline and may be changed at any point by One Model at its discretion. Purchasing decisions should be made based on current product capability only. Having said this, we are super excited to share what we are working on and actively engage with you regarding product innovation and the future of people analytics. At the risk of overusing some classic cliches; startups run on pizza and business runs on PowerPointTM (well slides anyway). The slides phenomenon has been prevalent for the last couple of decades and when I ask almost any company how they share information with managers, executives, boards, or in general meetings the answer over 90% of the time is “slides”. Storyboards & Slides When we recently announced One Model’s new Storyboard capability we hinted at a broader vision and here is part of that vision starting to unfold. The new Storyboards will have two modes, one where you have a fairly traditional tile based layout and the other where you are in presentation mode. Online interactive use of One Mode is growing rapidly, but much of the content from One Model still ends up in a presentation at some point, so we want to reduce the effort to create and maintain this content. Storyboards are then acting as both a modern interactive storytelling dashboard and interactive slide based presentation without the need for any rework. This will save a massive amount of time and also pre-positions the content for the most common destination to meet the consumers where they are. So, how does this work? The Storyboard view lets you arrange tiles on a forever vertically scrolling space with control over layout, size etc. You can then flip to Slides view to get an auto-arranged presentation with one tile per slide and controls to optimize the display for presenting to a group of people. Within the Slides view you can manage layout, decide which tiles to show or hide from the presentation, combine slides together etc. To help you create a narrative for your presentation you can open the outline view and craft the flow of your story. Being able to present online from within the One Model platform is powerful and provides you the ability to interact with the data in real-time to really engage with your audience. And, “yes”, to the question you are starting to form in your mind… you will be able to export this to PowerPointTM to blend with other presentations you are creating offline :) Telling a Story Using Narrative Insights Having assembled a compelling set of data isn’t sufficient to drive action. You also need to engage your audience and the best way to do this is through storytelling. The next major feature to our Storyboards vision is the ability to add a narrative to any tile that describes what is going on in straight-forward business language. Initially this capability will include information from One Model’s metric library and your own narrative, but over time we will incorporate insights powered by the One Ai machine learning platform. Captions can be rearranged as elements within a tile, or a separate, linked, tile with controllable positioning and layout depending on how you want to arrange your storyboard. The Storyboards vision is incredibly exciting and customers we have engaged in the design thinking behind these innovations can’t wait to get their hands on this new capability. Neither can we! Stay tuned for more information as the roadmap unfolds. This article has been primarily concerned with the developing technology of Storyboards, but I also want to let you know that One Model has a vast library of content to help you tell the story of how people drive impact in your business. We’ll write some more on this soon, but reach out if you want to learn more about our metric catalogue and ever-growing library of topic storyboards. When combined with OneAi, our Machine Learning platform, you can generate automated insights, future forecasts and identify key risks to answer the most pressing business questions you have today.
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Featured
3 min read
Nicholas Garbis
Here at One Model, we have some great news regarding our team! Nicholas Garbis has joined us as VP of People Analytics Strategy, bringing over a decade of significant global experience in people analytics and strategic workforce planning roles at firms including Allianz, General Electric, and Target. We like to let our people speak for themselves, so we'll turn it over to Nicholas now ... Why I am joining One Model? As a leader of People Analytics and Strategic Workforce Planning teams over the past ~15 years I have seen (and been part of) the transition of this work from fringe concept to a core requirement of the human resources function. The early leaders of teams like mine are now entering their second and third roles in different firms, leaving their imprint on their former organizations. At the same time, there are now many CHROs that have the knowledge and appetite for analytics and planning, and they are also moving between firms and building new teams. The days of conferences where presentations covered theories and frameworks with minor variations are in the past. We are definitely in people analytics/planning 2.0 now -- and it’s great to be a part of it. “The future is already here -- it’s just not very evenly distributed.” -- William Gibson. Having moved between a few large firms, and consulted into several more, I can assure you that Gibson was right. Going from one company to another might look like going back in time technologically and/or strategically, or it might be like achieving warp speed. As a strategist and practitioner, one needs to assess the situation as it stands and chart a course that has the best chance for creating value for the organization. Then it requires a constant balancing of priorities of team size and skills, new talent processes, and securing the needed technology. It’s not easy work, and the choices are never simple, but dare I say, it’s “fun”? Maybe “fulfilling” is a better word. I am joining One Model because I believe that technology is key to unlocking the next wave of value in people analytics and planning. I believe I can draw upon my own experiences and synthesize the experiences of others to help shape this 2.0 world. I have seen where the technology constraints can slow things down and create immense manual work, and I have seen where technology creates speed and scale. (Trust me, the latter situation is preferred!) Data is the strategic asset of the future, and this includes human capital data! As organizations continue to set up new people analytics teams, others will continue to progress into more advanced analytics and data science. Capturing the fullest value possible from human capital data will require technology that meets organizations where they are: for some it will be foundational data, metrics and dashboards, and for others it will be a robust data analytics platform with AI and machine learning already built in. One Model does both and will continue to lead the way. This is why I am joining the One Model team. About One Model One Model provides a data management platform and comprehensive suite of people analytics directly from various HR technology platforms to measure all aspects of the employee lifecycle. Use our out-of-the-box integrations, metrics, analytics, and dashboards, or create your own as you need to. We provide a full platform for delivering more information, measurement, and accountability from your team.
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Featured
1 min read
Stacia Damron
One Model welcomes Bruce Chadburn as the new APAC Region Sales Leader. Bruce has a long history of successful sales in the HR domain and particularly with people analytics platforms, having sold the Infohrm/SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics product for many years across the APAC region. Bruce’s most recent position was with Infor Global selling their ERP suite of software, where he led a strong team and achieved top global Sales Executive three years running. “It’s great to once again be working with the One Model team and reconnecting with the people, departments, and businesses that we helped be successful for so many years. I’m looking forward to doing it all over again.“, says Bruce. Bruce will take a Sales Leadership position at One Model primarily responsible for the APAC region but will lend his wealth of experience to the growing global team. “I’m excited to once again work with Bruce in the People Analytics domain, his knowledge, experience, and personability allows him to be able to anticipate our customers needs and deliver exactly what they want. His experience will be of enormous benefit as we scale our global sales team and processes” said Chris Butler CEO at One Model. If you would like a conversation about your people analytics needs, feel free to contact Bruce using the info below. Bruce Chadburn bruce.cadburn@onemodel.com.au +61 (0)434128866
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Featured
4 min read
Stacia Damron
This summer, One Model opens new Data Center in Sydney, Australia. It's been a busy period for One Model, especially for our growing Australia office. If you can scroll past this gorgeous teaser photo without getting sidetracked and planning a vacation, we are going to provide some updates on what exactly the team has been up to. To begin with, the team has just opened a new state-of-the-art, enterprise grade infrastructure in its Sydney, Australia AWS hosted Data Center. The Australian infrastructure, which meets strict security standards, joins One Model’s fabric of existing infrastructure in the United States and Europe, all of which are designed to provide a local, robust, secure, and high-performance environment for its customers’ people and business data. This is our first data center in Australia. The data center opening comes shortly after the acquisition of our newest Melbourne-based, customer. Our newest customer, an Australian wagering and one of the world’s largest gaming companies, selected One Model as the company of choice for their people analytics platform in Q2 of 2019. Our team is thrilled to be a foundational element to their employee experience strategy and we plan to provide a number of key benefits including improved insight into our people, increased efficiency, and strategic value to key stakeholders. Our people analytics infrastructure's fast speed of deployment will help this new customer shift away from a reliance on legacy ways of working and technologies. “With an Australian founding team and a sizeable part of the One Model Engineering and Product Management teams being based in Brisbane, the team’s local knowledge and proximity represents a unique opportunity for customers in the Asia Pacific region. It allows One Model to be an active part of our global product innovation compared to traditional analytics software vendors.” says Tony Ashton, Chief Product Officer for One Model. These additional data centers play a crucial role in the company’s ability to better serve its current and future Australian and Asia Pacific region customers, as well as ensuring business continuity as the company continues to grow within the Australian market. Earlier this year AWS received PROTECTED and IRAP certification ensuring security compliance for working with the Australian Government and large enterprise. “The opening of this new data center is inline with One Model’s commitment to expand where our customers need us and to provide local infrastructure and personnel for data security and delivery of support services. An additional data center is already planned for delivery in Canada to support our Canadian customers in Q4 of 2019”, says Chris Butler, One Model CEO. One Model looks forward to welcoming additional internationally-based companies into it's family of customers as we continue to expand to serve these additional markets. In Australia? Want to meet the One Model team in person? Join us for the annual Australian HR Institute (AHRI) Convention in Brisbane this September 16-19th, where we'll be exhibiting at stand #64. The exhibition hall is open to visitors free of charge. Let us know if you plan to stop by! About One Model One Model delivers our customers with a people analytics infrastructure that provides all the tools necessary to directly connect to source technologies and deliver the reporting, analysis, and ultimately prediction of the workforce and it's behaviors. Use our leading out-of-the-box integrations, metrics, analytics, dashboards, and domain expert content, or create your own as you need to including the ability to use your own tooling like Tableau, Power BI, R, Python as you need. We provide a full platform for building, sustaining, and maturing a people analytics function delivering more structure information, measurement, and accountability from your team. Learn more at onemodel.co.
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Featured
10 min read
Tony Ashton
Here at One Model, we are incredibly excited to have Tony Ashton join us from SAP SuccessFactors as our first Chief Product Officer and there is no better way to introduce the company’s first Chief Product Officer than for Tony to share his thoughts directly below. Why One Model? I'm incredibly excited to join the One Model team as the Chief Product Officer. I'm writing this blog to share my enthusiasm for One Model and also a bit about my background to hopefully serve as a guide to how we drive product innovation going forward. So why One Model? Simply put, One Model is doing the most exciting, innovative work in the people analytics space today. People Analytics is one of the most complex analytical domains due to the variety and complexity of the data. Even in systems purporting to provide a complete suite of integrated HR solutions the underlying data models for all of the different functional areas remain varied and complicated, if not impenetrable. Just think of the underlying data models within the core HRIS or Recruiting, Performance, Succession, Payroll, Benefits, Learning et.al. Then overlay concepts like date effectiveness, position management, multiple occupancy, changing organizational structures! I could go on. The One Model team has decades of experience in dealing with this specialized HR data domain and is the best company in the world at transforming all this data into one unified data model. No other company is going as deep and innovating as fast as One Model on the data modelling side and this is essential for success in People Analytics. Good clean data is critical for data science and most data scientists have to spend over 80% of their time assembling, organising and cleansing data. One Model solves this problem and provides scalability for data science. Beyond this, One Model is also leading innovation in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the People Analytics space. AI & ML are massively over-hyped, particularly when applied to the Human Resources domain. In large part this is because most data science in HR is based on one-off projects and not built to scale. The One AI platform One Model has built - it isn’t a generic toolkit, it is purpose built for developing insights for People Analytics. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & Robotics are now starting to drive real change and this has an incredible impact on how work gets done in business today. Analytics provides understanding and through the use of advanced technologies like One AI you are able to model the future, build alternate scenarios, understand the things that are driving change and take control of the future of work. I’ll talk more about “Why One Model?” at the end of the blog, but now want to turn to how I see the world of people analytics product management. Customer centricity and deep understanding. When building products you always need to think from the outside-in to understand the real problems you are trying to solve for your customers and this is my philosophy. The contemporary term for this is the "jobs-to-be-done theory", which has been around for a while and basically says you should focus on the task someone is trying to perform, or the outcome they are striving for and then design your solution to help achieve that outcome. When you say it out loud it is incredibly obvious, but then most of the best ideas are. Here's a great quick primer for you that's also a fun read: https://hbr.org/ideacast/2016/12/the-jobs-to-be-done-theory-of-innovation. (I have hired many donuts in my time - this will make sense when you read the article 🙂 ) I'm excited by ideas. Big ideas and concepts are important. I studied philosophy and history (with a focus on the history of innovation) at university and this passion nicely intersected with my business life when I read Clayton Christensen's quintessential book "The Innovator’s Dilemma". This book was ground-breaking in 1997 and the concept of the “Innovator’s Dilemma” is now part of popular parlance, but the principles are still impacting business today, so I recommend you have a read if you haven't already been there. Going further back, I was also influenced by Thomas Khun's seminal book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", where he coined the phrase "paradigm change" before it was hijacked for pop-psychology purposes. We are in a time of revolutionary change right now and understanding this is critical for success. Making something great. A mantra I borrowed from my good friend Philip Haine when we would work on new product designs together was this phrase he would often use: "What would be amazing?". You can run a detailed design thinking process and generate lots of ideas and this is a great structured way to involve people in designing a solution based on empathy, etc. but standing back and thinking about a problem from the perspective of the person at the center and simply asking “what would be amazing” for them is an awesome way to cut through and quickly generate truly ground-breaking solutions. Another mentor along the way was Dmitri Krakovsky, who would always ask this simple question of any project: "Is it great?". Mid-way through a product development cycle, if you sit back and ask yourself "is it great?" and it isn't then you should seriously think about what you are working on and why. Applied Technology & Innovation. Building on the 'making something great' discussion above, the best technology becomes seamlessly integrated with your work/life and genuinely helps you get things done. It should also be cool and fun to use. Have a think about what apps you like to use. Some I use everyday include Pocket, Flipboard, Slack, Evernote, Dropbox, Google Maps. What do all these apps have in common? They have a focus, they do what they do incredibly well and don't try to be something they aren't. Why isn't enterprise software like this? Why are all analytics products just like using a big spreadsheet, or so complicated you need a degree in statistics? Some products look pretty and appear simple to use, but often when you dig into it they just don’t deliver the goods. It doesn't need to be this way. The Art & Practice of People Analytics. When I found myself working in People Analytics I felt I found my calling. Building my skills along the way I recall a seminal event was when I attended an HR technology conference and saw an amazing presentation by Peter Howes on multidimensional analysis in HR using what was ground-breaking technology at the time. I then went to one of his workshops on how to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) of HR Interventions. Not long after I met Peter's business partner Anastasia Ellerby through a public sector project measuring and benchmarking the effectiveness of the Human Resources function. Through this project I started using their company's products as a customer. The company was Infohrm. With the help of serendipity I started working for Infohrm and the company built the most impactful workforce analytics and workforce planning products, practice and community in the world - it was cool. This then continued through two acquisitions, first by SuccessFactors and then by SAP. What always keep me engaged was working on the cutting edge of innovation in the field, working with companies all over the world and working with a great team of passionate people. We managed to build some innovative stuff, but I found myself in a 90,000+ employee company and it was becoming increasingly more difficult to deliver focused people analytics and planning innovation for customers and I wanted to get back to my passion. Everything I have discussed above dovetails perfectly with what One Model is all about. We are passionately creating the world’s most amazing technology specifically designed to help you deliver people analytics insights that accelerate decision making and drive positive outcomes for your business and a workforce planning capability that helps you plan, forecast and built a talent strategy for today and tomorrow. I’ve now written a much longer blog that originally intended, but hopefully it shows how enthusiastic I am for this domain and for this new role. The One Model team is incredible and the product is awesome. We have shared history and shared values stemming from the original Infohrm company and we do whatever it takes to make our customers successful. I'm grateful for the opportunity and super excited by the innovations we are cooking up and can't wait to share these with you soon. About One Model One Model provides a data management platform and comprehensive suite of people analytics directly from various HR technology platforms to measure all aspects of the employee lifecycle. Use our out-of-the-box integrations, metrics, analytics, and dashboards, or create your own as you need to. We provide a full platform for delivering more information, measurement, and accountability from your team. Learn more at onemodel.co. About One AI - Trailblazer Trailblazer is One Model's newest way of helping leaders incorporate workforce analytics and distill big data into every HR decision for recommendations that are smarter, faster, and more efficient. The Trailblazer program does this by giving HR teams access to the only openly configurable, HR-focused, automated machine learning engine in the world: One AI. Introductory Offer: Try Trailblazer out for a month - $1,000 Visit onemodel.co/trailblazer-program to learn more.
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Featured
3 min read
Stacia Damron
The One Model team is excited to announce that Tony Ashton has moved from Vice President of Product Management at SAP SuccessFactors to be the Chief Product Officer at One Model. One Model is an Austin-based HR technology company, with offices in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Tony will join our Brisbane, Australia office, which headquarters our rapidly growing engineering team. With over seventeen years of experience leading the people analytics product team at SAP SuccessFactors and before that, Infohrm (acquired by SuccessFactors), Tony brings a wealth of product leadership experience to the quickly-growing HR technology startup. “One Model is doing the most exciting, innovative work in the people analytics space today,” asserts Ashton. “No other company in the world is going as deep or innovating as fast as One Model in HR data modeling and the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to the field of people analytics.” As One Model’s Chief Product Officer, Tony will play an instrumental role in driving One Model’s product innovation strategy and bringing the company's vision to life across our People Analytics Infrastructure, One AI, and Trailblazer offerings. “This strategic hire will support One Model as it continues to remain a market leader in product innovation, development, and people analytics strategy on a global scale,” says Stacia Damron, Senior Marketing Manager. “Scaling our team is the next step; the right hires will be instrumental in the creation and evolution of our offerings, and in our commitment in the alignment of those offerings with both current and future customers needs.” One Model CEO, Chris Butler, is thrilled with this addition to the team. “Tony is without doubt the highest calibre and most experienced product leader in the people analytics domain. I am incredibly excited about the capability that Tony brings to drive our product forward and focus on the success of our customers" says Butler. About One Model One Model provides a data management platform and comprehensive suite of people analytics directly from various HR technology platforms to measure all aspects of the employee lifecycle. Use our out-of-the-box integrations, metrics, analytics, and dashboards, or create your own as you need to. We provide a full platform for delivering more information, measurement, and accountability from your team. Learn more at onemodel.co. About One AI Tony is instrumental in leading the One AI team. Making HR machine learning transparent and accessible to all is a key differentiator between One Model and other People Analytics tools on the Market. Tony's passion for building the community is unprecidented. Learn more about One AI.
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4 min read
Stacia Damron
One Model is keen on ensuring our customers have an exceptional experience interacting with both our software and team alike. That experience begins the moment we meet. Often, the moment that relationship begins is on our website. One Model's platform helps HR and People Analytics teams simplify the messiest of their workforce data, strewn over multiple systems. Our software makes life easier - and our website needs to reflect that simplicity. It needs to be straightforward, easy to navigate, and provide helpful resources and tools to help you continue to grow your people analytics functions. For months, we have been diligently working to create a site that betters your experience - a place that provides you with tools and resources to support you in your data-wrangling journey. Well, now it's official - at the end of Q2, we launched it! The new site has clearly defined solutions for companies looking to scale their people analytics capabilities at all levels - regardless of company size, including resources to get started for evolving teams, and strategies to leverage for more mature people analytics programs. Namely - our new website will more effectively serve those seeking more information regarding people analytics platforms and data warehousing solutions. One Model helps HR departments better support their people analytics team. The new website contains more materials, including white papers, customer testimonials, videos, and data-sheets. Our blog authors helpful tips, relevant articles, best practices, and useful insights for today's data-driven HR professionals and data scientists. The new website includes: Updated navigation better aligns customers with our offerings and core capabilities, reduces the number of user clicks to navigate the website, and directs users to relevant, meaningful content and solutions. List of integrations and partnerships enable users to easily identify integrations that can add value with their current software or platforms. Updated Blog enables users to quickly find applicable, informative content and industry news regarding workforce analytics, data warehouse management, data science techniques, and people analytics programs. More options to connect with the team via numerous information request forms. Additionally, they include more form variation, allowing users to submit requests for quotes, demos, or discussions. Supplementary materials to aid in decision making provide more materials to view, including white papers, customer testimonials, videos, and data-sheets. Career Opportunities showcase open roles and allow job-seekers to apply directly via that page. As our company continues to grow and expand within the US and UK markets, our new website will better represent One Model as we continue to set the bar for excellence in HR data warehouse management and people analytics team solutions. Visit onemodel.co for a comprehensive breakdown of our workforce data solutions. About One Model: One Model provides a data management platform and comprehensive suite of people analytics directly from various HR technology platforms to measure all aspects of the employee lifecycle. Use our out-of-the-box integrations, metrics, analytics, and dashboards, or create your own. Its newest tool, One AI, integrates cutting-edge machine learning capabilities into its current platform, equipping HR professionals with readily-accessible, unparalleled insights from their people analytics data.
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7 min read
Phil Schrader
People often ask us, "What makes One Model different?" Well...there's a lot we could show and tell. We've decided to respond with a series of blog posts covering each and every reason. Read on for more! You can't do this with Tableau. One Model features the most advanced role-based security system of any analytics application. It has to. People data is often the most complex and most sensitive data in an organization. Through 15 years of experience working with People Analytics teams and knowing how they wish to provide access, we built a security methodology that caters for all scenarios and fills the complex gaps that other vendors ignore. One Model allows administrators to define custom security groups and designate fine-grained application permissions to each: Can these users create dashboards or just view them? Can they even filter dashboards? Can they drill down to detail? Can they use the Explore tool? Can they build their own metrics? Can they access a metric in one population but not access it in another without changing roles? At the data layer, One Model group permissions control access at both the column level (which data elements a user can see) and the row level (which records of the data element a user can access): Can they see a given department’s data? Do they have access to compensation metrics? Can they cut those metrics by Grade or Position? If they drill in to that data, can they see person-level detail? Better still, One Model security roles understand each user’s relationship to the data. Who reports to whom, for example. That means you could grant all the leaders in your organization drill-down access to their own team members with a single contextual data rule that follows them through the organization as their data changes. Done. Zero maintenance required. Multiple roles merging together to provide the exact level of access for each user regardless of whether they're a HRBP, executive, or director with complex reporting lines. This is not something you can achieve with tableau, qlik, or any other vendor in our space. They come close but they don't understand the relationship between a user and the data itself, which results in constant role security maintenance -- if the desired access can be achieved at all. Why it matters Most teams have self-service is part or goal of their People Analytics Roadmap. If you want to deliver self-service with HR data, you’ll need to effectively and sustainably manage fine-grained sets of permissions like the ones described above. Here’s a look at what is possible with the right role based security capabilities. Let’s say that you’ve developed an integrated recruiting effectiveness dashboard. Your business leaders, recruiting managers, and HRBPs all have access to this dashboard. Based on aggregate data, your business leader can see that the new candidate assessment is, in fact, doing a great job predicting high performing new hires across the company. She drills into her own team’s details and scans through a few examples. This builds her confidence both in the assessment tool and in the dashboard. She’s likely to come back and use other dashboards in the future. The recruiting manager, looking at the same dashboard, is excited by the overall results, but wants to see if this assessment result is having a negative impact on protected groups of candidates in the hiring process. Given her role, you’ve given her access to aggregate slices of demographic data. She uses dashboard filters to cut the data by gender, age, and ethnicity without having to request a one-off ad-hoc report. She’s ready when the topic comes up in a meeting later that day. She thanks you the next time you see her. The division’s HRBP has similar ideas but her security clearance is more complex. Because her division is split across countries and, due to local laws in one country, she's not allowed to view performance ratings, or conduct age and gender analyses, which are seamlessly unavailable for this population. With this limitation in place, she wants to take things a step further in the One Model Explore tool and analyse a recent change to recruiting practices. She combines assessment results and termination data along with her most recent employee survey results. The results are so interesting that she reaches out to you. “Hey, my termination rates are down. We think we’re making better hires based on this new assessment tool, and employee satisfaction is up as well. These are all good signs, but can you figure out which results are driving the others?” After a cursory analysis, the next step is to prove there is a correlation and quantify its impact with the built-in OneAI machine learning suite. Awesome. Isn’t this scenario why your company funded the program in the first place? Without advanced role-based permissions? Well, you probably know that story already. It starts with a generic, one-size fits all dashboard. The plot thickens with the arrival of ad hoc reporting requests and vlookups. And the story ends with… well… more ad hoc reporting and vlookups. If this is something that excites you, let's talk. Click the button below to schedule some time with a One Model team member. We can answer any specific questions you may have, or just chat about role-based permissions (if that's what you're into). About One Model: One Model provides a data management platform and comprehensive suite of people analytics directly from various HR technology platforms to measure all aspects of the employee lifecycle. Use our out-of-the-box integrations, metrics, analytics, and dashboards, or create your own as you need to. We provide a full platform for delivering more information, measurement, and accountability from your team.
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6 min read
Chris Butler
On behalf of the One Model team I am excited to announce on our third anniversary of founding that we have secured an amazing seed round investment of $3.7M to take our people data platform to the next level for our customers. 2017 has been an incredible year of growth for us and has shown that our approach and value proposition resonates strongly with customers. So much so that we are yet to lose a single customer (0% churn) which is just about unheard of for a SaaS company that is now three years old. Our vision hasn't changed, we believe that in order to fully deliver on the value to be found in people data organizations need One Model to connect and understand the data held in the dozens of systems they use to manage the workforce today. Effectively we become a secondary system of record free of the constraints that transactional systems (HRIS, ATS, Talent Management, Payroll) suffer from. The last three years have been spent building out our core data platform, to connect and accept data from any source, to understand all the behaviors between data sets, and deliver our bespoke reporting and analytics platform. With this powerful framework in place we can add in more of the high value use cases that ordinary organizations would never be able to achieve on their own. Extending data with external sources, advanced algorithmic calculations, your own custom R/Python programs, and our incredible new automated machine learning tools. All running within our data pipeline and managed by HR. We're incredibly excited about our immediate future and this investment gives us the resources to chase it down. Chris Butler (press release below) One Model Secures $3.7 Million in Funding to Fuel Growth in HR Data and Analytics Software Market Austin, Texas, November 1, 2017 – One Model, the people data strategy platform, announced the closing of $3.7 million in Series Seed funding from The Geekdom Fund, Otter Consulting, Techstars, and Lontra Ventures. The One Model team will leverage this additional funding to fuel its international growth strategy, accelerate enterprise adoption for its products, and to further develop its leading HR data and analytics platform. “Getting to know the One Model team over the past couple of years made it an easy decision for us to want to lead this round. From the beginning, the team has been able to address major enterprise needs with their powerful HR data analytics platform driving data insights from machine learning, delivering this to customers flexibly while making implementation easy,” voiced Don Douglas, Managing Director of The Geekdom Fund. “One Model's people analytics infrastructure has changed how a number of organizations plan, execute, and evaluate their HR strategies and we are excited to support the proliferation of this game changing platform.” “The HR departments of multinationals see the value proposition that One Model brings to their infrastructure, evidenced by the rapid growth One Model has experienced. The implementation time and dollars saved are enormous,” states Mike Wohl, the Investment Manager of Otter Consulting. “The future looks very bright for One Model and all of the companies that utilize their offering.” The Austin, Texas-based startup is uniquely positioned to address a key pain point within the HR industry and is primed for growth. The company’s platform removes the heavy lifting out of extracting, cleansing, modelling, and delivering analytics from your workforce data. “One Model sits at the center of all people data held by an organization. As such, we’re in a unique position to understand, extend, and deliver organizations with transformative value from this data. Our vision is that every company will need what amounts to a secondary system of record that connects together all of their disparate people systems and provides a level of insight that no transactional system can achieve on it’s own. We’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible with the level of HR system interaction we are now achieving, and this investment allows us to double down on our approach” says Chris Butler, CEO of One Model. Founded in late 2014, the company has rapidly grown to support HR data and analytics needs of customers in over 156 cities around the world. This additional round of funding continues to authenticate the universal need for improved HR data and analytics management, and to validate One Model’s decision to assume a leadership role in addressing these data challenges head-on. “One Model leads the charge as the HR industry embraces analytics to improve career satisfaction, retention, and equity. The team is comprised of true industry experts who understand the nuances of enterprise software and the power machine learning. One Model’s robust pipeline of enterprise and channel customers will transform the lives of millions of professionals across the globe,” according to Andrea Kalmans, Lontra Ventures. About One Model One Model provides a data management platform and comprehensive suite of people analytics directly from various HR technology platforms to measure all aspects of the employee lifecycle. Use our out-of-the-box integrations, metrics, analytics, and dashboards, or create your own as you need to. We provide a full platform for delivering more information, measurement, and accountability from your team. Request a demo today at http://www.onemodel.co. About The Geekdom Fund The Geekdom Fund is a venture capital fund that invests in early stage IT startups in San Antonio, South Texas and beyond. It is managed by Riverwalk Capital, LLC. About Lontra Ventures Lontra Ventures is an Austin, Texas based entrepreneurial consultancy that specializes in life science consulting, and technology for high-growth companies. About Otter Consulting Otter Consulting, LLC operates as a venture capital firm. The company, which is headquartered in Florida, provides early stage venture capital financing services. About Techstars Techstars Ventures is the venture capital arm of Techstars. Techstars Ventures has $265M under management and is currently investing in their third fund ($150M). Alongside the VC and Angel communities, they co-invest in companies built by Techstars accelerator companies and alumni. For questions, please contact Stacia Damron, Senior Marketing Manager at stacia.damron@onemodel.co.
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8 min read
Mike West
"Life is a struggle, and then you die" So go make something of it. Work on something important and watch over these things. The 5 Reasons Most HR Analytics Efforts Stall: #1. Not having enough precision on what is the right problem to focus and what questions you need to answer to solve that problem. The typical fail is that you will spend a huge amount of time, money and effort to get a HR reporting environment set-up but downstream users do not use them. People say the information is nice to have - they just don’t have time to go look at your reports. Sometimes the problem is that the information has little relationship to important decisions, or little bearing on the work that anyone is doing. Often the people supported will request an infinite assortment trivial changes in the desperate hope that each change will produce a better result. Or with no specific reason provided you and your solution just go from hero to old hat over night - and you are left to wonder what actually went wrong. The problem is that you spent your resources and time working on the wrong problems and questions. More could have been accomplished with your time and effort had clarity been achieved at the outset. #2. Not having all the right data you need to answer the questions you want to answer. The worst possible outcome of analysis is to produce a statistically significant finding that increases certainty in a wrong answer. This is a common outcome of the “missing variable problem” (the unknown unknowns that wreck most analysis) This is some portion of the 80% of the variance your model did not explain. You ran the analysis but did not include the right control data, so you get an answer, but you get a wrong answer, and you have no way of knowing you got a wrong answer. Sound like a nightmare? This is not a nightmare, this is a real problem. The second worst possible outcome is when you do all the work and don’t achieve a statistically significant finding but could have produced a finding if you had included the right variables. In either case, not having a basic theory that would explain what variables to include in the analysis results in you never achieving a satisfactory outcome from your effort or you may double or triple the hours to reach a conclusive answer because many passes are required. These problems are why we pay university scientists the big bucks. Big Bucks!? O.K., not really! University scientists try harder because they know their work will be 'Peer Reviewed' by other really smart people who also know something about this topic. We don’t have this check inside organizations - we have non experts reviewing the work of experts. Major danger. #3. Expecting technology to solve the whole problem (absent analysts). You have made an important investment in supporting technology, but you may not get anything of lasting value out of this investment because you did not factor in the cost of acquiring (or creating) skilled operators of this technology. It is as if you have this wonderful piece of machinery sitting in idle. The success you have with analytics is dependent on the experience and preparation of the people working the analysis. You can achieve two different analysis outcomes with two different analysts, using the same technology! The worst part - if you get it wrong, how would you even know? Between different analysts you will find different choices about what data to include, chosen research method, as well as differences in skill in executing chosen method. Clearly, you need to think about analysts, but you must also think about the rest of the organization. It does not help you to have this group of "really smart data people” and nobody else who knows how to use their work. You need everyone on the same page on where we are trying to go, what everyone's role is, and how it all fits together. #4. Expecting your analyst to solve the whole problem (absent the right technology & support). Analysts are evaluated based on results. Some other HR roles can produce activities (implementing programs, policies, processes and systems) and we declare victory at the conclusion of the activity without respect to impact (which conveniently is never measured). Success is defined as completion of the project on budget and on time, then on to the next. Analysts do not have this privilege! For Analysts, the proof is in the pudding. If you tell the truth, "based on our data and the tools I have I found nothing of lasting significance to you" - your reward is you don't get invited back to the meeting. Analysts either produce very little value and stick around (satisfied with the activity for pay, as opposed to outcomes) or they leave for another opportunity to do better analysis. They either have a fire in their eye or they don't. You want the one who cares, or don't bother even starting. You have made an important investment in a person, but you can get nothing of lasting value out of this person without providing the tools and support they need to complete their work. Managing an environment like this is difficult, but not impossible - it requires skill and care. #5. Expecting results without someone putting in hard work. Your typical project management wisdom applies - choose one out of three : time, quality or cost. Every new question you want to answer will involve investment in new data collection, cleanup, transport, joining, reshaping, statistics and figuring out how to best communicate the results. We inevitably want automation of routine analytical workflow, but there is a first and second priority constraint : what should be made routine? How can it be made routine? We (technologists) will try our best to design out of this, but the first pass is best handled by a human - this will be hard to get around. It will fail if no one has put in the work. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do all the work - or even the hard work - just that somebody does and there is no way to escape this cost. You can bring in consultants to do the work, you can hire enough people in your organizations to do the work, or you can buy packaged solutions that help with part of the work. In this you will be making big trade offs on time, quality of delivery and cost. Beware - no silver bullet will kill this beast. You must make a commitment to ongoing refinement of the analytical process or you get an analytical process that really does nothing for you. If you get into the real day-to-day work of HR Analytics, the People Analysts are dealing with data that generated for some other purpose that does not conform to basic needs and expectations of our existing purpose. The best way to understand what must be done to automate an analytics workflow is to have someone work through the analysis one time to understand what data is there, what is not, what is wrong, and figure how what is there must be improved for successful analysis to occur. Often we implement expensive reporting solutions on the hope that these will produce useful insights. Why invest in automation (repeatability) if you can not achieve a useful finding through a manual effort? Hope? Hope is a great attitude to apply to all situations, but not a great strategy. Why not run through it manually one time and figure out if it is worth automating? The most important question is - when you got to the end of it all manually, do you end up with a report that is useful to the organization? If you did, great, now is the right time to make decision about automation. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- People Analytics is difficult, no doubt about that, but... I’m putting together a series of live group webinars where I will be revealing a process for dramatically increasing probability of success of People Analytics - building on a career of success and failures (Merck, PetSmart, Google, Otsuka, Children's Medical Dallas and Jawbone) - and applying new ideas I have developed over the last few years applying ideas from Lean to People Analytics. The goal of this webinar series is to engage a select group of qualified early adopters, who have access to an organization, are willing to apply the process, report back how things are going, and work out the bugs out together. This group will have opportunity to share their findings with the broader People Analytics and HR community, if you choose. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Who is Mike West? Mike has 15 years of experience building People Analytics from the ground up as an employee at the founding of Merck HR Decision Support, PetSmart Talent Analytics, Google People Analytics, Children's Medical (Dallas) HR Analytics, andPeopleAnalyst - the first People Analytics design firm - working with Jawbone, Otsuka and several People Analytics technology start-ups. Mike is currently the VP of Product Strategy for One Model - the first cloud data warehouse platform designed for People Analytics. Mike's passion is figuring out how to create an analysis strategy for difficult HR problems.
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11 min read
Mike West
To whom it may concern, For the last 2 years I am proud to have run my own People Analytics consulting company - PeopleAnalyst, which I like to call the first Independent People Analytics Design Company - but On January 1st - I will be joining One Model. These are the reasons: 1. I believe that People Analytics is important to the future of HR, the future of business and humanity – perhaps one of the most important business trends in our lifetime. I recently shared the principles I hold, supporting this thought here: Future of Human Resources - in 10 Principles. Beyond these principles I frequently try to point out that we had Accounting before we had Finance, we had Sales before we had Marketing, and we had HR (People Operations) before People Analytics. In every historical case, the application of an analytical framework to the pre-existing operational function revolutionized the way business was done, and those who were early to it were able to exploit lucrative informational advantages for a brief period of time before they became ubiquitous. In face of history these changes did not occur that long ago but today we think of them as always being the way they are. People Analytics’ time is now – in the future it will be “required for entry” in the big girls/boys club, but not be as much of an advantage as it is now. Pay very careful attention to the investment companies like Google and Walmart have made in People Analytics – 30+ people each and growing, going back several years. These companies are not stupid – this says something - they saw something. Google is “cleaning up” on the application of data to the People Operations/Talent area and in many markets they are a force to be reckoned with - nobody is anywhere near them on what they offer and how they do HR today. They are a steamroller. 2. Long ago I decided that my work - the application of data, math and science to HR - is my reason for being and part of the intentional legacy I want to leave on this earth. My commitment to what we now call People Analytics is unchanging - the key for me as I go through life is just figuring out where my efforts will have the most impact. I make moves when I sense the math on this has changed. Merck -> PetSmart -> Google -> (brief cross functional divergence)-> Children’s Medical ->PeopleAnalyst (my consulting company - the first People Analytics design company) -> now One Model… As we move forward, I think my area of greatest contribution will be to embed my unique way of approaching People Analytics into a technology environment, making it more realistic, accessible and affordable to more organizations. It is quite an amazing thing for a guy like me to have access to an engineering team with seed funding – I’m not going to pass on that opportunity. 3. Team - I believe in the magic of teamwork. I saw this video, which reminded me of what can be accomplished with teamwork : http://wapo.st/1U19g0M Gives me chills - the good kind. InfoHRM --> Success Factors --> SAP If you know anything about the history of enterprise reporting solutions for HR, the foundational predecessor to modern HR Analytics, you will find that the engineering team at One Model has a very interesting pedigree. Going back 10 years, the only system in this space was a little company called InfoHRM – they were out on the leading edge of HR reporting, essentially running a “cloud-like” solution before we even knew what the cloud was. InfoHRM was acquired by Success Factors (purportedly to help them crack the HR data reporting challenges they couldn’t seem to solve on their own), and then Success Factors was later gobbled up by SAP. I don’t know the whole behind the scenes story, but my general impression of what happens to people in these big company acquisitions is that how the product is perceived, the dynamics of working for an organization, as well as where you fit into all that really change. These guys fell out of that. When you see people who helped built a product category before anybody else was doing anything like it, who say now we are building something better knowing what we know now, you stop and listen - at least I do. TechStars – The Top 1% of Startups Another thing I really like about One Model is that they came out of the TechStars Accelerator program. Accelerators like TechStars are super-selective--less than 1% of applicants get in. You could say they are pickier than schools like Harvard, Stanford and MIT. In addition to direct assistance in getting the business model on the right track, and the well know “Pitch Day” TechStars alumni have access to a network of investors and advisors for life. In the Startup world, access to capital matters and access is primarily determined by your network. An element of this may seem like a superficial game of “who you know and who knows you”, but an element of this is ability to get to people who have been through good and hard times and can help you solve really difficult problems. Austin - SXSW and Food Trucks about say it all. These guys came to Austin to launch their company a little after the time that I did. I’m an HR guy – I’m all about culture and Austin has the right culture for me. Austin is hip (some call it weird), is second only Silicon Valley for startup community, in a US state that is friendly to business, has a lower cost of living than either US coast, and is well positioned geographically for US enterprise sales – 4 hours by plane to either coast and within driving distance or very short plane flight of 3 other major cities (Houston, Dallas and San Antonio). The startup community is tight-nit, collaborative and with a lot less of the showmanship and games you see in the Silicon Valley – I think a higher percentage of people here take creating a real business more seriously. Beyond these intangibles, when it comes to HR data, keep an eye on Austin, this is where it will be, there is some important stuff going on this space here right now. Mostly I just love Austin – it is an island of authenticity and creative energy unlike anywhere else. 4. Product Focus – oh where we can go together. One of the big mistakes I see in the field right now is that most people that are thinking at all about the space are thinking too narrowly. They think People Analytics is just one type of question, one type of data, or the application of a certain method of working with data. Let’s say prediction, for example. Examples include, how do you predict hires who will perform well in your environment or how do you predict what people are most likely to leave in a given time frame. However, some of these strike me as gimmicks - not standing up on real solid data - People Analytics is much more than this. For example - I have personally worked with data on HR on decisions involving how organizations select (staffing), onboard, pay (compensation), perk (benefits), the origins of happiness and motivation at work, quality of managers, employee commitment/turnover, performance, diversity, learning/training, time off policy, the relationship of HR outcomes to sales outcomes, etc… Others have worked on topics I haven't - the list continues. On top of the varied subject matter focus, you can focus on how you collect data, the tools to make data flow more efficiently, the methods you can use to analyze it, statistics, how you visualize the data, how you distribute to other people, etc. Any and all of these are potentially viable areas of business focus that you will see niche products in. As methods, machine learning algorithms and prediction are hot right now – all these are in our future, but we still have a lot of work to do on them. Here are the main perceptions I will offer on product focus at this time: People Analytics is eclectic, expansive and inclusive. In its essence, People Analytics is the systematic application of behavioral science and statistics to Human Resource Management to achieve probability derived business advantages. We need solutions that enable analysts to be better analysts, in the world of possibilities, not try to replace the analysts entirely. We need solutions that create more heros, not less. People tire quickly of gadgets and nobody wants to purchase and manage an ever-expanding assortment of gadgets (or only if they are all made by Apple). I’ll put it another way - One Model looks more like an aircraft carrier to me than a paper airplane. Organizations operate as holistic systems, therefore the answers to problems span across areas of specific functional responsibility, expertise and operational data stores. We have a lot of silos of data in HR – HR has undergone progressive advances through technology specialization and will continue to. The great irony is that the future of HR Analytics may be just reversed: synthesis, not specialization. The differentiating premise of One Model is synthesis. Many advantages will stem from this vantage point. If you care about synthesis of data in HR One Model should be on your short list. To do any analytics, simple or advanced (prediction, forecasting, optimization), accurately, regularly, in a timely and efficient way requires address of sprawling un-integrated operational HR data sources and process. One Model decided to start with the ‘data munging’ fundamentals and build from there. That doesn’t sound sexy and is a little more difficult initially to get the same kind of PR as a result, but it is important, and they will steadily deliver increasing value on that foundation, offers a lot of possibilities, and takes customers into the future in steps, not all at once. Imagine showing up to the board room with predictions about employees but you can't accurately answer or get to quickly any of the basic employee ins and outs questions. Begging the question - do you really know your workforce? What exactly do you do here anyway? I'm all for prediction and One Model is going there but don't over promise, really get to know HR data specifically, get the 'data munging' fundamentals right, organize more sources data more efficiently than anyone else, and delight and surprise the customer progressively as you go. I agree with this – I think it works better, fits the needs of today's HR function, and matches my practical MidWest (US) values. Cloud / Software as Service is here, is the future. The premise of One Model is that they can invest big in infrastructure and innovation on that infrastructure and distribute those gains to everyone. It only gets progressively better and more efficient over time. Why should every company invest in homegrown infrastructure for HR Reporting and Analytics independently? To reinvent all HR Analytics workflow internally at every organization is unrealistic for most organizations as it is a ludicrous business proposition. We no longer design our own homegrown HRIS systems today - why create and maintain our own technology infrastructure for HR Reporting and Analytics? I think 5-10 years from now we will look back and wonder why we used to do this at all, evoking the puckered sneers that “legacy HRIS solutions” get today. Don’t get me wrong - you should invest in ultra advanced or niche innovations in analytics unique to your business, in your environment, however in order to have the time and resources available to apply that kind of focus, you can rent everything else. How about getting on a platform that can speak to those applications and everything else. Like I do, these guys believe in "play nice with others" and that good guys do win too sometimes. You want to come along for the ride? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Who is Mike West? Mike has 10+ years of experience building People Analytics from the ground up at companies such as Google, Merck, PetSmart, Children's Medical, Jawbone and other places. Mike's passion is to develop thought leadership and to cross pollinate the frameworks and processes he helped develop and pioneer as an employee at these places. Mike spends most of his time teaching, coaching and writing on all things People Analytics.
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