Using “Big Data”
Posted May 22nd, 2012
It’s called Big Data, and many are saying it may transform the way human resource departments operate.
Big data refers to really huge masses of information. Quantification – analyzing big data — is rushing through not only business but academia and government. Big data has been classified as an economic asset, like gold.
Big data is about a new approach to understanding the world and making decisions. There is a lot more data all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years. In business, economics and other fields, decisions will more and more be based on data and analysis rather than experience, according to some experts.
And the data is not only becoming more available, but more understandable to computers. Most of the big data is just a cacophony of information. But the computer tools that are able to make sense of this data are becoming more sophisticated all the time.
The credit reporting company Equifax is an example of how big data is being used. All of the data stored by the company can be aggregated to give profiles of selected groups of people. For example, Equifax has snippets of behavioral data for everyone in their system. And it’s a big system – Equifax has credit data for 85 percent of Americans. They know a lot about the financial behavior of people.
There are restrictions on how the data can be used. The gathering of credit reporting data is closely regulated by federal law, which limits what can be done with data. Equifax, for example, cannot sell companies credit data about clients. But they can mine their data for information in the aggregate, and this information can be sold.
And a company called Talx, which has access to the data, is doing just that kind of mining. Talx can, for example, tell a company what the total indebtedness is for its workforce. They also give averages and data on subsets of an overall aggregate. Another service can tell you what the aggregate student loan debt is of your workforce.
Employers can, for example, get information on the car loan volume of their workforce, which can enable them to make deals with financial institutions for lower car loan rates for the company.
So, there are many ways that this aggregate data can be applied to the workforce. It shows the impact that big data may have.
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