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Data Mining Moves to HR  

For most of its eight-year history, Cataphora has focused on digital sleuthing. The company hunts for statistical signs of fraud. But in the past few years, Cataphora has been dispatching its data miners into a new market: statistical studies of employee performance.

The trend, though early, is unmistakable, and it extends far beyond Redwood City. Number crunching, a staple for decades in the quantifiable domains of engineering and finance, has spread in recent years into marketing and sales. Companies can now model and optimize operations, and can calculate the return on investment on everything from corporate jets to Super Bowl ads. These successes have led to the next math project: the worker. “You have to bring the same rigor you bring to operations and finance to the analysis of people,” says Rupert Bader, director of workforce planning at Microsoft (MSFT).

Such a mission might have been laughable a decade ago. But as the role of computers in the workplace expands, employees leave digital trails detailing their behavior, their schedule, their interests, and expertise. For executives to calculate the return on investment of each worker, their human resources departments are starting to open their doors to the quants.

From Business Week, an insightful article on how value of each employee is determined by HR using Data Mining/Analytics.

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Written by Guru Kirthigavasan

March 22nd, 2009 at 7:44 am