People Analytics Holds The Key to Unlocking Effective Enterprise Transformation
Stop letting gut instinct drive your biggest changes. Read on to learn the people analytics framework to systematically model skills, organizational design, and workforce planning for a successful enterprise transformation.
Enterprise transformations fail at an alarming rate. In fact, research from BCG indicates that failure rates can be as high as 75%. One common reason for these failures is the failure to define the strategic "how” behind what organizations hope to accomplish, essentially, how the organization will leverage its human resources efficiently and effectively for a successful initiative.
At this year’s HR Leaders Global People Analytics Summit, the first panel of the day shed light on this topic. During The Workforce Intelligence Advantage: How to Predict, Plan, and Perform Using People Analytics, we heard from top leaders in the HR and People Analytics (PA):
Abhay Gangadharan, Director, Future of Work at Google
Ying Li, Global Head of People Analytics, Senior Director at PepsiCo
Daniel Baraldi, Senior Director, People Analytics at Visa
Samantha Kalsow, Director, People Analytics at UKG
Ramesh Karpagavinayagam, VP, Global Head of People Analytics & Employee Listening at MassMutual
[Moderated by]: Chris Rainey, CEO & Co-Founder at HR Leaders
The main takeaway: a systematic framework that embeds People Analytics into transformation from day one ensures your people aren’t an afterthought but a strategic enabler. Learn how to do it in your own organization, now.
The What-How-Where-When framework
Successful transformations address four fundamental questions in sequence, with PA serving as the connective tissue between each stage.
What: Skills inventory and gap analysis
Every transformation begins with a seemingly simple question: What skills do we need that we don't have?
The "what" pillar is focused on identifying and understanding your current skills inventory and comparing it to your future strategic needs. This includes:
Skills that exist within your current workforce
Skills your transformation strategy requires
The gap between current and future state
The market availability of required skills
While organizations generally understand this matters, many struggle to build systematic processes to assess, track, and plan around skills.
PA teams are uniquely positioned to lead this effort because they can integrate data from learning systems, performance reviews, career histories, and external labor market intelligence to create a complete picture of organizational capability.
How: Organization design principles
The "how" pillar addresses a critical question: How should we organize these skills for maximum effectiveness?
Organization design requirements vary dramatically by function and work type. Operational roles, for instance, require different spans of control than creative roles. The appropriate management layers for a sales organization differ from those in a product development team. Processing work requires different structures than strategic work.
PA brings rigor to organization design by modeling different structural scenarios against multiple variables: cost, efficiency, collaboration patterns, and decision-making speed. This data-driven approach replaces gut instinct with evidence.
Where: Location and sourcing strategy
The "where" pillar tackles geographic considerations: Where will we source and deploy the talent we need?
This question has become exponentially more complex. The post-pandemic workplace includes distributed teams, hybrid work preferences, varying geographic cost structures, and dramatically different regulatory environments.
Smart location strategy must balance all of these impacts. PA teams can connect data across real estate, compensation, benefits, talent acquisition, and compliance.
When: Integrated workforce planning
The final pillar of this framework is workforce planning, aka the "when" that drives operational implementation to put all that planning into action.
In addition to projecting headcount, successful workforce planning must also address:
Skills acquisition pace and effectiveness
Organizational design implementation
Geographic distribution of talent against strategy
Monitoring progress toward transformation milestones
Course corrections based on market changes
Integrated workforce planning is where you monitor whether you're actually acquiring the right skills, organizing them effectively, and deploying them in the right locations at the pace your strategy demands.
Why people analytics is the natural owner
PA teams are uniquely equipped to implement this framework because they sit at the intersection of all the elements needed for org transformation. From data and storytelling to HR and business operations, it starts with PA pros.
This framework requires:
Connecting skills data with organizational structures, compensation information, real estate costs, and labor market intelligence.
Predictive modeling to forecast skill availability, organizational design impacts, and workforce planning scenarios.
The presentation of complex analysis to the C-suite, mid-management, and hiring managers in actionable ways.
Agile iteration which involves continuously updating plans as market conditions, business priorities, and transformation progress evolve.
That’s what mature PA functions do. As business priorities shift, PA serves as what one practitioner calls "the oil in the machine"—finding quick wins and second-best options to keep transformation momentum alive.
Implementation: Three critical success factors
Organizations that successfully implement the 4-Pillar framework share three critical characteristics.
1. Alignment across organizational levels
The C-suite, mid-management, and hiring managers must work from the same data and metrics. Success occurs when these roles sit in the same room, agree on the numbers, and align on what those metrics mean for their respective priorities.
This requires thoughtful persona mapping: What does the C-suite need to see? How does that cascade to mid-management? What information empowers hiring managers to execute? PA must surface insights at the right level for each audience.
2. Partnership beyond HR
Operating in silos kills transformation. Strong partnerships across HR functions (talent acquisition, total rewards, learning, talent management) and beyond HR (finance, real estate, IT) ensure that priorities stay aligned and metrics remain consistent.
The framework only works when PA can connect data from real estate (facilities costs), benefits (total compensation), talent acquisition (sourcing effectiveness), and learning (skills development) into a coherent narrative about transformation feasibility and progress.
3. Investment in foundational capabilities
Despite continual change, certain fundamental capabilities remain essential. Building blocks like data quality, governance frameworks, core analytics infrastructure, and stakeholder relationships enable everything else.
Organizations that chase shiny new use cases without solving foundational problems end up with impressive pilots that never scale. Unless you've already solved fundamental issues around data trust, integration, and governance, invest there first. Then rapidly deploy successful use cases.
So, how do you actually implement this framework in your organization? It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Start with one specific transformation initiative as your proof point.
Map your current state honestly across the four pillars.
Then identify and invest in the highest-impact gap first.
The new people analytics mandate
Enterprise transformation is no longer optional. Most large organizations are feeling the continuous change right now. Market conditions shift, technologies disrupt, competitors emerge from unexpected corners of the world, and customer expectations evolve right alongside all this change.
In this environment, PA can't be a backward-looking reporting function. It must become a forward-looking strategic enabler that helps organizations navigate this constant change.
The What-How-Where-When framework provides a systematic approach to that challenge. It ensures that as organizations define ambitious transformation goals, they're simultaneously building realistic, data-driven plans for the human capital required to achieve them.
Yes, the C-suite sets the organization’s destination. But people analytics shows them how to actually get there. You can dive deeper into Organizational Design here.
