Connecting Silos: How HR Analytics Helps Win More Business and Breaks Down Barriers

Over the past 10 years, the funding environment for medical research in the U.S. has become increasingly competitive. By leveraging existing data and unique analysis capabilities in the Human Resources office, a small team of senior leaders teamed with an HR data analyst set out to identify and advocate for organizational change. The question is: How do you build high-performance proposal development teams in a changing environment? While this work may not win a Nobel Prize nor cure Alzheimer's Disease, it will help scientists bring in more dollars towards life-saving research. This presentation is the culmination of a process of engagement between HR, senior managers, IT and Finance. This level of cooperation in developing analyses for focused decision-making helped lay the groundwork for process improvement. The data used for this project included grant and contract award data, compensation and benefits data, expenditure data, financial / accounting transaction data, and proposal development data. This wide variety of data inputs required significant data clean-up partly because each of the systems used to generate the data has its own quirks, as largely home-grown systems developed in-house or enhanced by in-house application developers. The focus is on the “local research administration” function of a large medical school. This function is the front-line in assistance to faculty.