Accelerate your human capital strategy with an organizational data model

Organizational data modeling — a way of organizing your human capital and resources information — can unlock your ability to bring to light answers to key operational questions about human capital planning, operational efficiency, and operational effectiveness.

Leaders today are continuously challenged to design their organization in a way that will achieve growth and efficiency at multiple levels, from the company overall down to specific departments.

Organizational data modeling can be a powerful tool to provide leaders access to a curated set of organization data. In turn, this can help them derive better insights from their data and take a more data-driven approach to driving the business’ strategic agenda.

The importance of focusing on human capital

An argument can be made that an organization’s human capital is its most valuable asset, perhaps even more than financial instruments — no amount of money can help an organization succeed without the right people moving it forward.

Despite this, a common perception of data-driven initiatives is that the investment made by organizations to gain quantitative insights into the state of their human capital often seems relatively small compared to the investments earmarked for designing dashboards, analytics, key performance indicators (KPIs), data stores, and all manner of data-driven tools that manage financial assets.

This is not to say HR functions are underfunded, but it’s a reflection that the application of data-driven methods for managing human capital takes careful thought. Humans, unlike dollars, are more than just numbers that are inherently quantitative.

So, how does one even begin to analyze human capital strategy in an objective, quantitative manner?

How to approach organizational data modeling

Organizational charts used to visually represent structure — be they hierarchical, matrix, network, or flat — are complicated to build and can often be influenced by an organization’s political subtext.

For example, individuals at different hierarchical levels might appear at the same level on a chart for the sake of optics or reasons rooted in other subjective criteria.

To better analyze your human capital data, here’s a multistep approach that can help you get started.