Data Integration and Analytics Blog for UKG

Has this happened to you?  You’ve spent time developing a complex query and then fields go missing.   And you wonder why.

I made this mistake several times.  So, it’s worth a blog post.  At the least, it will help me remember not to make the mistake again.

As I’m sure is true for many of you, UKG People Analytics (formerly known as Cognos Business intelligence) is not my first reporting tool.

That’s good – because you understand data and reporting. 

That’s bad – because your learned behavior may mislead you.  And if you’re really like me, you have no hair left to pull out.

You have lots of HR software with lots of acronyms.

And you have ambitious visions of team members using cool visualizations to improve outcomes and efficiency.

HR Data security 101

Most of the time folks only care about data security when there’s a problem.  When PII (Personally Identifiable Information) was leaked.   Or someone had access to some payroll or other key data that they shouldn’t have seen.  Oops.

A client has both UKG Pro and UKG Kronos Dimensions.  They want to see punch back up for each pay check.

The challenge is figuring out the apply date.  Which is clearly on the screen but not to be found in the Data Hub Database.    Here is what we did to figure out this key piece of information.

Many, many HR data analytics projects don’t work because proper Master Data Management is not in place.

HR Master data management means that key data about every employee, every job code, and every department is consistent in all your systems.

Recently, UKG has started supporting Dimensions data in People analytics.   Our clients’ experience indicates that DataViews are cool for manager and employee self-service but don’t work well organization wide analysis.  As for the BIRT reporting tool – I’ll invoke the thumper rule.*

Before you start training in UKG People Analytics

You know you have a lot of data in your UKG Pro (and now UKG Dimensions) system which you can access with People Analytics.

In our previous post, we discussed why we recommend that you use PowerShell for data integration.  If you’re a data professional, you may have some objections.  (Indeed, if you’re not a technical person, you should probably skip this post).

As there are many specific tools for data integration (Boomi, SSIS, informatica), you we think you should choose PowerShell.  Whether your data source is an Excel spreadsheet, a text file, a Rest APIs, or a software specific reporting tool, PowerShell should be the glue that binds them all together.  There are two reasons we think you should choose this direction.