The Right Tool for the Job

Evaluating Big Data Tools At Intermountain Healthcare

Steven Hadley, HR Analytics and Technology ManagerIntermountain Healthcare

September 18, 2015

Steven Hadley

Steven Hadley has worked as a practitioner and analyst in the Human Resources and Payroll domain for over 12 years. As a self-proclaimed data nerd he is truly passionate about data analysis, business intelligence, and the promise of a brighter future through data.

Intermountain Healthcare

27 hospitals, 200 clinics, insurance, homecare

~900 Employed physicians and ~3,800 Affiliated physicians

~37,000 employees and 3,000 volunteers

Intermountain Healthcare

Top Integrated Health System

100 “Most Wired” Healthcare Organizations

Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility

Gallup Great Workplace Recipient

The Right Tool for the Job

Presentation Objectives:

Improve your understanding of what “big data” is, learn about technologies and techniques that fit well within HR and Payroll

Hear about some of the difficulties when using big data tools and obstacles in evaluating their effectiveness

Develop a focused strategy for finding the right tools to analyze information within your organization

What is “big data”?Using additional data sources and new analytic tools to produce superior, actionable analytic insights (not previously possible or cost effective) leading to Improved operational outcomes Reduced cost Improved customer experience

• Web Traffic• Historical data• Cross-ERP• Social Networks• Vendors

• Instant Messaging• Social Traffic• Market Analysis• (Change, Analysis, or

Creation)

• Social posts• Communication Sentiment• Screening question

sentiment

• Emails• Resumes• Question Responses• Ambient data

Volume

Velocity

Veracity

Variety

Big Data Technologies

These show promise for HR

Graph Databases

Data Lake

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Machine Learning

Technology – Graph Databases

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Technology – Data Lake

The Data Lake

Technology – NLP

Technology – Machine Learning

What could it do for HR and Payroll?

Use Cases: Sourcing of Candidates - network clustering Candidate Screening – longitudinal studies and profiles High Performer Identification –ambient data and data

exhaust HRBP Interventions – what if you could…

Cool or Creepy?

What if you could…

Stream emails, IM’s, web traffic, collaboration tools into a data lake employing graph database technology

Employ NLP to look for signs of disengaged teams

Use machine learning algorithms to prescribe a way to the concern

Notify and deploy HR teams to proactively intervene

Not as easy as you think

To me the possibilities of what we can do with big data tools, technology, and information is AMAZING.

Can Big Data Technologies live up to the hype?

Let me illustrate this with a story…

The Right Tool for the Job

2005 GMC Yukon Denali

The Right Tool for the Job

The big data hype and many big data vendors would have you believe it’s simple

20% Turnover Reduction

=Socia

l Media

Turnover

Demographics

Recru

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BLS Census

R2

Not as easy as you think

Keep the data secure – blind it/de-identify it?

Discuss particulars of the data set up front

Identify realistic outcomes before starting

Figure out hardware and software

How much will it cost?

Leave plenty of time for contracting and setup

The Right Tool for the JobTool What we expected What we

experiencedOutcomes

Tool 1 Sold as a machine learning tool Turned out to be an automated Linear Regression tool

Did provide insights but required LOTS of data massaging

Tool 2 Data miner to tell what is important Ranked data but didn’t determine significance

Good place to start but not end to end solution

Tool 3 NoSQL graph database with NLP Theoretically should have provided SO much insight – NLP tool didn’t have an HR Ontology

Even with a super computer, 1 Terabyte of RAM and a reduced data set we couldn’t get it to complete an analysis

Tool 4 End to end insight and reporting Lots of good tools within a tool Could have caused some issues with data governance for the company.

Tool 5 Natural Lanaguage Processing Capabilities

Great ontology for healthcare but no HR Ontology

Would have had to create our own but we didn’t have the capability

Tool 6 Data Lake with data indexing on the way in

No HR specific use cases have been run yet

On the medical side we’ve improved our standard care procedures for stroke patients

What’s your strategy going to be?We’ve identified several additional suppliers and tools that we’re interested in. However, based on our experiences we decided to create a team of analysts that have interest and experience with some big data technologies before moving forward.

Our plan is to evaluate these tools in a prioritized way with some standard questions that we’ll ask as we use each tool.

Our biggest issue still seems to be data “munging” and data scrubbing before using each tool. ETL is costly so we’re looking for ways to minimize that work.

Whatever your strategy is going to be, we recommend that you have one before you start. Remember with big data tools you may need an entire tool box.