Humanyze Brings Advanced Analytics and New Data Sources to Business Intelligence

Humanyze is paving the way in helping organizations understand how their teams interact in order to increase performance. Founded in 2011 out of the MIT Media Lab, the company brings over a decade of advanced research in organizational network analysis and behavioral science to Fortune 1,000 companies to help them uncover how work actually gets done.

With a global presence spanning the US, Europe, and Asia, Humanyze is on a mission to improve the future of work. It provides immediate insight to help its clients uncover patterns on how work actually gets done, decide on the types of interventions to make, and measure the impact of change management initiatives on productivity and performance.

Solutions

Powerful Analytics Engine: Management tools in the past have delivered subjective, incomplete insights. With the explosion of available data, customers no longer have to rely on surveys or observations to understand what’s working (and what isn’t). Humanyze’s metrics quantify the previously un-measurable factors for team success, like collaboration and communication, which are essential for productivity and performance. It discovered that data exhaust from systems such as email and Skype can be used to uncover informal communication networks. These communication networks are fundamental to understanding how work gets done.

Business Process Optimization: Humanyze helps clients to capture how communication patterns impact their processes. They can get feedback on how process changes have affected their teams’ collaboration and work patterns, giving them the ability to continuously iterate and improve.

The majority of today’s solutions provide a tremendous amount of insight around team performance but what they don’t reveal are the processes and behaviors that drive those results. With Humanyze Elements^®, clients can objectively measure collaboration to better understand the components behind their teams’ success.

Space Design and Planning: Executives and real estate professionals today are tasked with implementing workplace strategies that maximize team performance and collaboration. Previously clients had to rely on subjective information and one-size fits all office trends to drive decisions. Humanyze provides objective data to understand what kinds of spaces are optimal for their teams. Most importantly, they are able to receive continuous feedback allowing them to effectively design, measure, and adjust where needed.

Companies’ workspace has a tremendous impact on how teams communicate, work, and deliver. In one case, a subtle change in office layout increased collaboration and drove increased sales of 11% at a major European bank.

Privacy by Design

Data privacy is at the core of Humanyze’s software platform’s functionality. Humanyze is committed to ethical data practices and customers are required to abide by its Data Privacy Policy to protect employees’ personally identifiable information (PII) and private confidential information (PCI) in order to guarantee full anonymity.

The Humanyze Elements Platform gathers and analyzes data by:

Step 1: Retrieve Metadata

The client prepares and gathers corporate communication data on-premise. No content is measured. No personally identifiable information (PII) or private confidential information (PCI) is gathered. This metadata simply indicates how information flows within the corporation; how communication is sent “from” and “to,” the time the communication occurred, the duration, and the channel (such as “email”).

Step 2: Anonymize Data

Data on Humanyze’s people analytics platform is integer based. The names of employees are not present in its data, there’s only an encrypted, anonymized, 256-bit, indistinguishable integer that represents each employee. All data is encrypted and then purged 90 days after the project. The client always possesses and protects the secret encryption key. Data transfer to Humanyze is administered by the client through a secure FTP. The client shares the communication metadata and the encrypted alias list.

Step 3: Aggregate Data                

Humanyze imports all communication metadata and the alias list provided by the client into the Humanyze Elements Platform. Its platform aggregates all metadata at the team level and its algorithms analyze the data to uncover patterns on how work actually gets done. It presents these insights at the team, department, or organizational level.

Meet the Leader

Ben Waber, CEO, and Co-founder: Dr. Ben Waber is the CEO and co-founder of Humanyze. He is a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, previously worked as a senior researcher at Harvard Business School, and received his Ph.D. from MIT for his work with Alex “Sandy” Pentland’s Human Dynamics group. Waber’s work has been featured in major media outlets such as Wired, The Economist, and NPR. He has consulted for industry leaders such as LG, McKinsey & Company, and Gartner on technology trends, social networks, and organizational design. His book, People Analytics, was published by the Financial Times Press in 2013.

“Our insights are helping organizations uncover patterns, make definitive interventions and understand the impact of process changes faster, and more accurately than ever before.”