Three Issues with the State of People and Workplace Analytics

Hüllmann J. A., Mattern J.

Abstract

People and workplace analytics is a hype topic. It depicts information systems and processes for data-driven decision-making that concern people-related organizational outcomes. The topic is driven by practitioners with only scarce academic backing. We outline three challenges for the field of people and workplace analytics: first, ambiguity in definitions and conceptions, second, sparse research as well as a lack of scientific evidence for the espoused value propositions, and third, a lack of strong theoretical foundation. To address these challenges, we propose a categorization schema, grounded in existing research on management information systems and tailored to people and workplace analytics. The schema helps to identify the prevalent conceptions on people and workplace analytics, and to clarify the elicited gaps in understanding.