Building Credible Human Capital Analytics for Organizational Competitive Advantage

Despite the enormous interest in human capital analytics (HCA), organizations have struggled to move from operational reporting to HCA. This is mainly the result of the inability of analytics teams to establish credible internal HCA and demonstrate its value. In this article, we stress the importance of conceptualizing HCA as an organizational capability and suggest a method for its operationalization. We argue that the development of HCA within an organization requires working with three dimensions of HCA: data quality, analytics capabilities, and strategic ability to act. Moreover, such work must be undertaken on three levels: individual, process, and structure.