There are a small cadre of amazing individuals in the HR space that are truly shaping the future of HR analytics - and David Weisbeck, the Chief Strategy Officer from Visier is one of them! He was kind enough to be interviewed for the readers!
1. Dave, It really is my honor to be interviewing you - so for the purposes of the readers - what is your overall background?
I started, some 18 years ago now, as a developer helping to build a product known as Crystal Reports. I was drawn to analytics early, and the possibility of using information and data to find amazing insights that could change the course of your actions, your team's priorities, or whole companies. While I started writing code, and I still love the creative side of building products, I also found myself drawn to helping people use analytics. From a career perspective, this meant moving to product management, marketing and general management roles. Crystal Decisions - who made Crystal Reports - was acquired by Business Objects, which in turn was acquired by SAP. I found myself leading the analytics business at SAP as an SVP and GM, when fate called (or John and Ryan as co-founders to Visier) and we started Visier to try to solve this analytics problem in a new way. At Visier I look after strategy - what products we build, and how we market them.
2. If you don't mind, what do you do for fun? If we caught you on a Saturday - what would you be doing?
At this time of the year Saturdays mean taking my son to baseball, which is a ton of fun. But with no other responsibilities, two hobbies vie for my attention - cooking and photography. I've always been drawn to pursuits that have a strong technical side, plus an artistic side. Both food and photography share this as technique, equipment, etc feed the technical side, but these technical pursuits are never enough to create something you'd be proud of. You need the artistry. I think analytics shares this as you need to technically, for example, manage data. But you need the artistry to tell the story of what you've uncovered so people understand it. Lately, I have turned to trying my hand at homebrewing, which shares this artistic and technical pursuit as well.
3. Okay, Given your success at Crystal Reports, you probably could have retired or picked your next job - what made you gravitate to helping HR?
There are practical sides for Visier in this decision. For example, HR has been underserved, and the profound questions that analytics can help people answer tend to exist broadly across companies, industries and even regions. Beyond the practical side, I find people the most fascinating of any aspect of a business. Nothing is done without people - no ideas created, no strategy realized, no plans implemented. And people are also the most complex part of the business, and the most costly. This sets up a situation where the potential gain is the greatest, but the challenge to overcome is also the greatest. Perhaps I just like a challenge, but I think in the end it relates more to a fascination with that squishy part of businesses - people. Without realizing it, most of the business books I've kept and read over the years are about people, so perhaps there is no surprise I was driven to HR.
4. Give us an overview of the VIsier products!
Happy to. Our focus is workforce analytics and planning. Our experience in the business intelligence (BI) market taught us that analytic projects had a few big challenges: they were very costly, took a long time to complete - generally 12 months or more, and end users were dissatisfied with the results. We created Visier with the idea of turning the analytic approach on its head by starting with the end user in mind. HR and business users have key questions in mind they need to answer about their workforce. The traditional BI approach is to, in order: source data from applications, build a datawarehouse, then implement report writers and dashboards, and finally create those reports and dashboards. The users gets involved at the very end when the reports and dashboards are complete, but what if the wrong questions are answered in those reports and dashboards? Then you have to go back to step one to get the data, then update your warehouse, etc. With Visier, we approach this by determining the most important questions first - where to source the best talent, who is likely to leave next, how to optimize your compensation spend, and others - and then make it our responsibility to make the right connections to the data needed, and manage all of the infrastructure for you. As we like to say, you just need a web browser and data in your HR applications, and we'll take care of the rest.
5. Given my readers are a cross section of HR, technology and analytical folks - Brag a bit! What are you doing behind the scenes to run this system? How fast it? What Analytical tools are you using? How many Data Scientists do you have on your team?
There has been this revolution in the analytics world towards Big Data. I was fortunate to be involved in that very early. One of the key technology shifts that enabled Big Data solutions was in-memory technology. What that means for Visier is that all of the processing done on employee records is done lightning fast, and with tremendous flexibility. In practical terms, the performance for companies with 150,000 employees is no different than those with 1500 employees - and we've tested this to over 2.5M employees. Further, we do all of the calculations on the fly, so it doesn't matter if the data you are accessing is indexed or not, and if you want to change the structure of the data? No problem, you can do that on the fly with no performance hit. For the truly technical, some numbers to consider. Modern memory needs 40-billionths of a second to return data. Modern processors can do a billion operations a second. Hard drives take 1-hundredth of a second to return data. So, what that means is 250,000 data fetches could have been returned from memory, and calculations on them performed by the CPU, before one data element came back from the hard drive. But in the end, the technology is fascinating, but it is the questions we can answer that get me most excited.
6. How many customers are using your system(s) today?
We have around 5000 users of the system today, which is spread across about 2 dozen customers in production. And across that about 1.5M employee records are held in our systems.
7. What is your vision for the next couple of things you want to tackle for the HR profession?
I don't think we done more than tap the surface of the profound questions we can answer with analytics. Our vision is to change analytics from a system where today you can ask questions, to a system that highlights key insights for you and prompts you with the best actions. As an intermediate step to that we are heavily investing in a new way to approach workforce planning. Our view is that it has been too divorced from the financial aspects, and too heavily weighted to either only focusing on strategic roles, or only counting headcount for hiring plans. HR has a critical business-impacting role, and we feel they need more help from their tools to analyze, understand, recommend, plan, and help execute business-impactful change.
8. Give a Shout Out! Your User Interfaces and Data Visualizations are very, very impressive - who is doing that piece of the work?
It is, of course, a team sport, but our user interface lead is Max Bitel, who is extremely passionate about design and experience. We are always cautious to highlight that looking cool is one thing, but being intuitive and thoughtful to how people work. So the user experience, not the user interface, is our real goal. But we know that part of the appeal to get broader adoption of analytics will come from some of the "wow" factor when people see beautiful visualizations. I know Max shares this passion for the user experience, but he also deserves the accolades for the wow-factor as well.
9. Since you do an amazing amount of work across clients - what HR analysis have you consistently found to be the most productive and drive the most results?
If I had to narrow down to focusing on immediate financial results, the answer would be retention. People are often surprised to learn the real cost of attrition, which can be 150% of salary for professional roles in organizations. A close second would be on the recruiting side, which also can have longer term strategic benefits. One of the most critical places that HR can directly show its impact to the organization is in filling the talent pipeline with the highest quality talent, and making that talent available when the business needs it. But the business also needs to understand the talent pipeline as all too often they assume that all roles in all locations are equally difficult to hire. When you step back and look at planning the workforce, especially for change or growth, and analyze the labor supply so you can be strategic about how and where you source talent, or how you develop talent, then this can make a real difference for organizations.
10. Last question and Fun One! Given you see so much data - what is one of the funniest moments and/or analysis you have come out with?
It isn't easy to come up with funny moments in data analysis. I'm pretty certain there aren't a lot of comedians making their success with telling data-related stories. But, one story does stand out for me. One of the profound questions we try to answer is who of your top talent is likely to leave the organization next. We once presented this analysis to the head of HR of a large enterprise who had her extended team in the room. They had requested us to show them some of our capabilities including this one to highlight employees at risk and to use their real data. Of course, it happened to work out that one of the employees at risk was in the room during the presentation. Fortunately, everyone in the room saw the humor in the situation.
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