The IT Artifact in People Analytics: Reviewing Tools to Understand a Nascent Field

Hüllmann J. A., Krebber S., Troglauer P.

Abstract
Despite people analytics being a hype topic and attracting attention from both academia and practice, we find only few academic studies on the topic, with practitioners driving discussions and the development of the field. To better understand people analytics and the role of information technology, we perform a thorough evaluation of the available software tools.We monitored social media to identify and analyze 41 people analytics tools. Afterward, we sort these tools by employing a coding scheme focused on five dimensions: methods, stakeholders, outcomes, data sources, and ethical issues. Based on these dimensions, we classify the tools into five archetypes, namely Employee Surveillance, Technical Platforms, Social Network Analytics, Human Resource Analytics, and Technical Monitoring. Our research enhances the understanding of implicit assumptions underlying people analytics in practice, elucidates the role of information technology, and links this novel topic to established research in the information systems discipline.

Keywords
people analytics; IT artifact; archetypes; social network analytics; human resources analytics