At a Conference Board event last week, I was asked on a panel by Row Henson, now at Oracle, “Why do you think HR has been so slow to adopt Human Capital Analytics?” I built my response on five reasons, and asked the audience if they had more, but nothing substantial came to complement these:

1. Legal: except for regulatory reasons such as EEO, there is no established business obligation to report on any broad talent issues.
2. Cultural: HR and talent management have not been historically using metrics to represent results like finance or operations.
3. Value perception and funding: many executives understand that talent is key, but often they don’t know what to ask for and do not fully understand the key value drivers, so they are reluctant to fund those initiatives.
4. Lack of standards: even if we compile some data, it is often hard to benchmark ourselves against other companies, as there is little or no common standard.
5. Technical: until now, there were very few systems that could enable good talent management analytics.

Note that I said “until now”. Many of my colleagues at Taleo would highlight our existing benchmark data, staffing metrics and scorecards that Taleo currently produces, and our soon to be unveiled unique approach to talent analytics. Let’s hope that finally overcoming technical issues (#5 above) will enable Talent analytics to become the new standard for talent management metrics.

Note: the only companies that say they report systematically to their executives were companies that adopted the balanced scorecard approach! It is time that executives wake up and notice that talent metrics are some of the best leading indicators they can have at their fingertips!