Business Intelligence, Analytics and Human Capital: Current State of Workforce Analytics in Sweden

Abstract: The way organizations make decisions today is very often purely based on intuition or gut-feeling. It does not matter whether decisions are of high risk for the company’s future or not, managers golden-gut is the only thing that determines whether invest- ments should be made or not. Analytics is the opposite of this intuition-based decision making. If taken seriously, almost all decisions in organizations are made on facts that are analytically derived from massive amount of data from internal and external sources such as customer relationship systems to social networks. Business leaders are becoming more aware of analytically based decisions, and some use it more than others. Analytics is usually practiced in finance, customer relationships or marketing. There is, however, one area where analytics is practiced by a small number of companies, and that is on the organization’s workforce. The workforce is usually seen as one of the most complicated areas to practice analytics. An employee is, of course, more com- plicated than a product. Despite this fact, companies usually forget that conducting analytics on employees is very similar to conducting analytics on customers, which has been practiced for many decades. Some organizations are showing great success with applications of Workforce Analytics (WA). Most of these organizations are located in the US or outside of Sweden. This thesis has conducted research on to what extent Workforce Analytics is practiced in Sweden. Empirical findings show that some com- panies use WA in Sweden. The practice is not of highest sophistication of WA. Also, they show aspiration towards the idea of WA and some are locally conducting various of applications.