Companies have been investing in People Analytics and Industrial Psychology since the late 1800s, going back to Fredrick Taylor (time and motion studies) and Carl Jung (psychological types). The original idea was to scientifically manage work, using data to measure labor, strength, motion, and later engagement, skills, and leadership.

All this effort resulted in thousands of books and tools to measure employee engagement, employee experience, productivity, and organization design.

Ultimately where we landed was a new domain we call People Analytics: using people-related data to monitor, improve, and optimize business outcomes. And this journey, which I’ve been a part of for 30 years, resulted in a massive investment in HR technology platforms, engagement surveys, sentiment analysis tools, and more and more models for trust, leadership, management, wellbeing, and employee growth.

All that energy, deep thinking, and investment now lands in a new world, one we call “Systemic Business Analytics.” We use this name because it’s time to stop isolating people data from business data and running this domain as “projects,” rather think about it as an integrated analytics system.

In other words, as I explain in the podcast, let’s move forward and take all the people data we capture and embed it right into our existing business measurement systems. Instead of creating a “people data warehouse” to run reports and analysis on HR information, we can use that valuable information and put it right in the hands of business leaders and managers.

Our new research, “The Journey to Systemic Business Analytics,” details this journey and shows you our four level maturity model. (You can view the maturity model here.)

Today fewer than 10% of companies are doing this well, but that’s still a large number. And as I describe in the podcast, AI is going to light a bonfire under this space and rapidly accelerate this direction.

Additional Information

People Analytics, A Complex Domain, Is About To Be Transformed by AI.

People Analytics Certificate Course in The Josh Bersin Academy

Systemic Analytics: A New Approach

Galileo, The AI Assistant for Everything HR