Don’t be afraid (yet) but big data is coming to your job. While it is unclear whether it will make life better or worse, it is almost certain to change the way companies function.
Workday, a leading maker of cloud-based software for running corporate human resources and financial operations, has announced it is putting into its products the kind of data analysis that Netflix uses to recommend movies, LinkedIn has to suggest people you might know, or Facebook needs to put a likely ad in front of you.
In the workplace context, however, this is a much bigger deal than whether you want to see “Rango” or get tempted to try pomegranate juice. Instead of relatively trivial transactions, even in its early days this data analysis is aimed at shaping organizational charts, spotting financial behavior, or increasing competitiveness for jobs.
One version of the Workday predicts which high-performing employees are likely to leave a company in the next year; it then offers possible actions (more money, new job) that might make them stay. In another instance, expense reporting software can predict which employee populations are most likely to exceed their budgets.
In addition, Workday says it has surveyed more than 1 billion online social media profiles and job listings to make lists of people who might be recruited for different jobs. This is even tougher than it sounds: There are, for example, over 600 ways that someone might describe working as a registered nurse, such as “ER RN” or “midwife.”
The company says it has classified about 20 occupations this way, and in a year will have something like 70 such occupations identified, enabling recruiters to find a larger population of potential candidates for a job.
Aneel Bhusri, Workday’s co-founder and chief executive, said the move into the insight and recommendation business was a natural consequence of being a cloud-based business, because these companies have access to so much more data about and for their customers.
“We leverage a lot of the same thinking and algorithms” as consumer cloud companies like Netflix, he said, “but the data is more complex, and there are more algorithms.”
Indeed, Workday’s move follows by just a couple of weeks Salesforce’s announcement of a big data analysis tool for that company’s sales management software. Like Workday, the Salesforce product combines data from its own product with external data, like weather or product specifics, to provide insights. Tidemark, another cloud company for business, has its own product for projecting future performance.
In other ways, though, what Workday is doing is far more advanced, and potentially influential than anything yet seen in the broad big data offerings.
“This is why I came to corporate software,” said Mohammad Sabah, director of data science at Workday. He had previously worked at Yahoo and Netflix. “Making an employee happy, improving the efficiency of a company these are hard problems that affect corporations.
“We’ve applied machine learning to affect consumer tastes,” he said, “putting it to career choices, to pay and employment, have a huge upside if we do it right.” Already, he said, “we’re surprised how accurately we can predict someone will leave a job.”
It is also likely to become a fraught area, as public social data is increasingly employed to one’s fate as a worker. If you start tweeting more about your job, for example, is this a sign of greater engagement? If that behavior is looked at, would you do it even more to curry favor?
Workday is also used for school recruitment: Should knowledge of what companies like to see on a resume affect choices in curriculum design, or the kinds of projects students work on?
There are also potential questions about performance. One future product may be the ability to predict who will and won’t make their sales quotas, and suggest who should be hired to improve the outcome. Might a performance review at bonus time soon include projections of how one is going to do in the future?
Mr. Bhusri said Workday will look to how its customers use the analysis tools in figuring out what to build next. The company is also keeping private insights learned at one customer, but would eventually like companies to pool their learning, and make even more powerful applications.
But however fast or slow Workday goes, he left no doubt that he and other companies will continue to collect and measure more of our lives.
“All the cloud providers are data aggregators by the nature of their businesses,” he said. “Anyone natively cloud has the same benefit. You can do rich analysis.”