Optigrow: People Analytics for Job Transfers

The information technology (IT) services industry is undergoing a rapid change with the growth of market interest in cloud, analytics, mobile, social, and security technologies. For service providers to match this pace, they must rapidly transform their workforce in terms of job roles, and do so without incurring excessive cost while continuing to deliver core services. In this paper, we describe a big data approach to enable such a transformation through internal job transfers of suitable employees from legacy areas to growth areas. Toward this end, we use data on employee expertise to mathematically profile skill sets required for growth area jobs and develop a statistical scoring algorithm to prioritize internal candidates to be transferred to those growth area jobs. We describe how we have enacted this analytics procedure within the IT services division of the IBM Corporation and provide empirical results. We also discuss the lessons learned during the deployment, focusing mostly on organizational reasons preventing wide uptake.