An integrated HR ecosystem: who owns and manages what type of data

• 3 min read

From a business intelligence perspective, we know HR data comes from a fragmented HR systems landscape. In order to be able to properly use this data, we have to first of all understand who owns and manages what.

For a better understanding, we present here an excerpt from the recently released Docebo whitepaper entitled “Integrating the HR landscape on the Cloud” by David Wilson, CEO of Fosway Group.

What data lives where?

by David Wilson, CEO of Fosway Group

There are many different HR systems and processes, and our people data is spread across them. The core HRMS is viewed as the ‘system of record’ or master data repository but in fact only contains a small subset of the information, often focusing on the transactional data used to track their basic employment, such as name, ID, location, home address, pay information, manager and so on.

Much of the key data needed to determine what they do, what they could do, and how well they can do it lives outside the core HRMS.

The following diagram is a simplified summary of how this will look in many organisations.

Some important examples of this are:

  • An employee’s skills and competencies will probably be in the learning system
  • Their job title will be in the HRMS, but their job role and KPIs will be in the performance or talent management system
  • Their specific goals are in the performance management system
  • Their training certifications (i.e. what they have been shown as being trained to work on) are held in the learning system, and this may explicitly limit what work tasks they are legally able to do in work systems
  • An employee’s previous work experience and skills information before they joined the company probably lives in the recruiting system
  • Who might be the best people to fill open positions are not just in the recruiting system, but in the internal talent profiles and succession plans
  • Key talent information or risk of flight lives in your talent and performance system, but the actions to retain key talent probably is their development plan, learning history, compensation plan and employee engagement
  • Understanding where to invest in training to drive increased sales or customer satisfaction means pulling data from sales and customer systems, learning and performance systems

These are simple examples, but it is obvious that they have a major relevance in working out who the right people are to work on the right things. Connecting people data across the fragmented HR systems and process landscape is critical, as is connecting it with the systems of work.