Companies need to hire smart and talented people in order to generate all those wonderful new revenue streams. If the folks in HR provide managers with succinct, understandable reports of employee information, managers can use that data to make wiser hiring decisions and retain the best workers. Then HR executives can claim to be at least indirectly strategic. HR effectiveness depends on getting good information to the right people without delay, and that's not so simple. HR systems folks agree that it's difficult to provide that kind of employee information, since HR data resides on a multitude of systems spread across the company.
Nobody measures the same way.
A research group called the Saratoga Institute in Santa Clara, Calif., is working to create standardized HR benchmarks, one of which, the Extended Industry Benchmarking Program, is only three or four years old, so there aren't decades of information to analyze. Sounds to me as if HR executives might have a chance of pulling up a seat at the strategy table by working on their numbers.