Talent Management Analytics

This is a fantastic article on Talent Management Analytics (aka HR Metrics).
Written by Dr John Sullivan, it goes into great depth on the reasons that these measures are typically ineffective / weak. In summary:

• Skill deficiencies in HR practitioners to actually create / report on the metrics
  
• Lack of business knowledge (inhibiting the ability to establish relevant metrics)
• Expensive tools raising the entry price tag
  
• Lack of quality data
• Complicated nature of talent management
  

Also covered are a few promising developments in this area:

• text analytics (i.e., software that pulls out summaries and trends from massive amounts of raw text data like forums, blogs and intranet documents)
• predictive modeling (i.e., using statistics to actually prove relationships scientifically rather than just hypothesising & making guesses)
  

A few principles for adopting Talent Management analytics are presented as well. I like the concept of addressing business rather than HR problems and preparing yourself for failure on the first attempt.