Following the data trail for competitive advantage.

• Author: Broughall, Mary
• Position: The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know Your Customers - Book review

The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know Your Customers by Leerom Segal, Aaron Goldstein, Jay Goldman, and Rahaf Harfoush examines and describes methods to utilize the pervasive trend of tracking data about everything around us. While this book is not intended specifically for records professionals, anyone working with people will be interested in the ideas advanced by the authors.

The Decoded Company

The key to "sustainable competitive advantage," according to the authors, is to become a decoded company: one that is "talent-centric, data-driven, flexible, and fast." The authors highlight companies like Google, Starbucks, and Whole Foods, who use big data for serving their customers--and have turned their algorithms inward to decode their own employees.

The authors write that decoding the "real story that is embedded in the data trail" that follows employees and their projects allows companies not to "get the better" of their talent, but to "get the best from them."

3 Transformative Ideas

The Decoded Company distills how this process works with what they call the following "three transformative ideas."

Technology as Coach

The first idea, "Technology Can be a Coach," posits that by personalizing processes to the individual based on experience, an organization can offer training interventions precisely at the teachable moment.

For example, the telecom Sprint was struggling with customer service issues in 2008. The authors' relate how Sprint was able to identify a troubling statistic in one call center:

Thanks to their informed intuition, managers were able to track down and identify the problem: a group of recently hired agents were unfamiliar with certain features on a newly released device. Therein lies a teachable moment. Sprint was able to identify the agents who needed training at the precise moment when they really needed it. They were able to intervene with real-time training ... Data as Sixth Sense

The second idea proposes that "Data Can Be a Sixth Sense." By collating organizational insights using actual data, organizations can watch their blind spots and give their people enhanced decision-making ability. An example cited in this section is Google's "Did you mean.?" feature. In the authors' words:

What you probably don't know is that it works entirely based on ambient data fed by Google users into a sophisticated, statistical, machine learning algorithm ... the algorithm looks for a repeated pattern of a search...