Regular readers of this column will know that people-based business intelligence is one of our hot topics at Webster Buchanan – in fact, we published our latest report on the subject just a few months ago. It’s partly because of our background in financial management – where effective reporting and analysis is everything – and customer management – where effective reporting in sales, marketing and customer service should be everything but is often sadly missing. And it’s partly because the tools to carry out good analysis have been available for a long time and get better and better. I well remember seeing a demonstration of some pretty whizzy people-based analytical software in California more than a decade ago and thinking this could do the whole sector a lot of good.

Ten years on, while some organizations have made impressive steps forward in the way they analyze their employee base, many HR functions still lag far behind. As we’ve pointed out before, too much of the emphasis is still on operational reporting – how well the HR function is performing – and too little on how effectively both HR and the employee base is contributing to the business. It’s the difference between asking, for example, how fast vacancies are being filled and what impact those vacancies are having on the business – or in assessing average days lost to sickness absence, and analyzing the cost of absence in terms of cash, productivity and opportunity. In both cases, the business perspective gives a whole new angle to recruitment and absence strategies.

The reasons why much of the HR world has been relatively slow to adopt these kinds of business-centric metrics are many and varied, but part of the issue invariably comes down to experience. The finance function’s currency is figures and metrics: HR’s remit includes reporting on numbers and statistics, but much of its remit is on softer skills and intangibles. If you don’t have a long pedigree in making meaning out of data, it’s harder to do, with or without good tools.

Our latest report on Software as a Service (SaaS), published this month in association with Computers in Personnel, has a bearing on this. Much of the report, which was co-written with SaaS expert Phil Wainewright, focuses on the potential benefits and challenges of SaaS, a form of IT outsourcing where the vendor hosts business software on its own systems and customers access it over the internet. But the report also points to what we believe is the next generation of these hosted services, where suppliers will start to wrap consultancy services around the software.

In the business intelligence field, that might mean you have two different services on offer: one where you simply pay to use reporting and analytical software, the other where the vendor carries out some of the analysis for you. You probably don’t need help with basic operational reporting – days to hire, diversity reports and the like – but deeper level trend and ‘what if’ analysis might usefully be carried out by someone with more expertise in the field. In this case, there’s nothing wrong in confessing that in-depth analysis isn’t your thing – you can simply outsource it to someone who specializes in the field.