Human capital analytics : an investigation of success factors, methods, and basic assumptions

Abstract

Human resource information (HRI) is information such as head count, fluctuation, succession planning or results from employee surveys that is available to an organization. Despite being a high priority issue for practitioners and researcher s, this topic remains far from reaching a level at which the users of HRI – mostly managers and senior executives – are satisfied and perceive HRI as effective and useful for decision-making. This is due to a knowledge gap regarding which relevant attributes HRI needs to hold. In order to fill this gap, we built on theoretical arguments from the information systems literature and integrated them into an HRI success model with the key variables ease of use, information quality, perceived usefulness, user information satisfaction, and information use. This model was tested among 179 managers in Swiss banks, and structural equation modeling provided clear support for it. In particular, information quality was a key determining factor for both user in formation satisfaction and information use, and here was a weak link between user information satisfaction and actual HRI use. Both academia and practitioners might benefit from this mode l by achieving a deeper understanding of the key factors and interdependencies leading to successful HRI.