The International Journal of Human Resource

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Staying close to business: the role of epistemic

alignment in rendering HR analytics outputs
relevant to decision-makers

Markus Ellmer & Astrid Reichel

To cite this article: Markus Ellmer & Astrid Reichel (2021) Staying close to business: the
role of epistemic alignment in rendering HR analytics outputs relevant to decision-makers,
The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 32:12, 2622-2642, DOI:
10.1080/09585192.2021.1886148

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The International Journal of Human Resource Management
2021, VOL. 32, NO. 12, 2622–2642
https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2021.1886148

Staying close to business: the role of epistemic

alignment in rendering HR analytics outputs
relevant to decision-makers
Markus Ellmer and Astrid Reichel
Department of Social Sciences and Economics, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
HR Analytics (HRA) are said to create value when providing HR analytics; HRM-as-
analytical outputs that are relevant to decision-makers’ practice; epistemic
immediate business issues. While extant research on HRA practice; eHRM; digital
HRM
attributes success (or lack thereof ) in providing business
relevant outputs to the presence or absence of particular
skills and resources, we know little about how practitioners
actually mobilize these skills and resources in daily practice.
Drawing on observational and interview data from a case
study of an HRA team, we identify boundary spanning, cus-
tomizing dashboards, and speaking a language of numbers
as three epistemic practices in which team members com-
bine and mobilize a particular set of skills and resources
that allows them to accomplish epistemic alignment, i.e.
aligning to decision-makers’ perception of business reality
when creating analytical outputs. Epistemic alignment
enables the team members to produce complex analytical
outputs while at the same time staying close to the deci-
sion-makers’ immediate business problems. At the same time,
team members are capable of accounting for conditions in
the broader organizational context, such as compliance
issues, dependencies, political tensions, and a prevailing
data-driven decision culture. Our findings contribute to
knowledge on how organizations can build effective HRA
and how advanced forms of digitalization transform the
work of HRM in contemporary organizations.

Introduction
Increased possibilities to gather, store, and process data have spawned
unprecedented possibilities to generate insights for understanding, pre-
dicting, and controlling business outcomes (Davenport, 2006). In the

CONTACT Markus Ellmer markus.ellmer@teamecho.at Department of Social Sciences and Economics,

University of Salzburg, Kapitelgasse 5-7, Salzburg, A-5020 Austria
Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2021.1886148.
The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author,
ME. The data are not publicly available due containing information that could compromise the anonymity
and privacy of research participants.
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
License ((http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction
in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 2623

Human Resource Management (HRM) domain, these developments have

recently sparked a vivid interest in HR Analytics (HRA), i.e. leveraging
data for supporting HR decision-making in organizations. As with other
‘waves’ of digitalization in that past (Bondarouk et  al., 2017), one central
question arising from such technological shifts is how they affect the
work and perception of HRM in organizations (Angrave et  al., 2016;
Bondarouk & Ruël, 2009; Marler & Boudreau, 2017; Strohmeier & Parry,
2014; van der Laken, 2018). One central hallmark in extant literature is
that HRA can support value creation when it is capable of providing
business relevant outputs, that is, actionable insight into how HR-related
events, developments, or trends relate to decision-makers’ immediate
business outcomes (Minbaeva, 2018; Rasmussen & Ulrich, 2015; van den
Heuvel & Bondarouk, 2017). How such relevance is achieved, however,
remains a quite open question in current HRA literature. Yet, knowing
the process of how HRA practitioners come to ask the ‘right questions’
and turn data into ‘actionable insight’ is far from trivial as it can bring
detailed insights into how HRM can effectively support value creation
and how this affects the perception and recognition of the HRM function
in organizations (Greasley & Thomas, 2020; Legge, 1978).
Extant literature argues that building business relevant HRA requires
organizations to establish particular skills and resources at the individual
and organizational level. These include suitable theoretical frameworks
articulating connections between HR, individual and organizational out-
comes, and strategic goals while ensuring proximity to actual business
issues (Boudreau & Cascio, 2017; Levenson, 2017; Peeters et al., 2020;
Rasmussen & Ulrich, 2015), appropriate data and technology manage-
ment (Minbaeva, 2018; van den Heuvel & Bondarouk, 2017), as well as
appropriate research and communication skills (‘storytelling’) (Boudreau
& Cascio, 2017; Levenson, 2017; Minbaeva, 2018). Research further
recommends to establish workflows and effective knowledge transfer
mechanisms (Boudreau & Cascio, 2017; Minbaeva, 2018; van den Heuvel
& Bondarouk, 2017), e.g. by facilitating close cooperation with other
departments such as finance or marketing (Rasmussen & Ulrich, 2015).
While having these skills and resources is certainly of high importance
for generating business relevant outputs, extant perspectives tend to be
normative rather than empirical and adopt a quite static view on HRA.
In particular, they attribute the success (or lack thereof) of HRA to the
presence or absence of certain skills and resources. Hardly any attention
has been dedicated to how such skills and resources are actually mobi-
lized in daily HRA practice, e.g. how HRA practitioners leverage existing
networks to synergize their knowledge, skills, and resources with those
of other departments (e.g. Barbour et  al., 2017), or what role technology
particularly plays in these processes (e.g. Anthony, 2018; Kaplan, 2011).
2624 M. ELLMER AND A. REICHEL

In this paper, we use observational and interview data from a case

study of an HRA team at TechCom, a German MNC operating in the
technology sector, giving insights into the situated, social activities of
HRA. By empirically illustrating how team members attempt to render
analytical outputs relevant for the HR board member of TechCom, we
answer the following research questions: Through which practices do
HRA practitioners render HRA outputs relevant to decision-makers?
And what skills and resources do practitioners mobilize in these prac-
tices? By answering these questions, we contribute to existing HRA
literature by providing suggestions of what organizations can do to
establish effective HRA. We further contribute to wider debates on the
digitalization of HRM by showing how advanced forms of digitalization
transform the work of HRM in contemporary organizations.

HRA as epistemic practice

To explore practices by which HRA practitioners render HRA outputs
relevant to decision-makers, we apply an ‘HRM-as-practice’ lens as
proposed by Björkman et  al. (2014), conceptualizing HRM as social
phenomenon brought into being by the everyday activity of practitioners.
Putting the focus on the ‘practice of HRA’, we understand HRA as the
situated, social activities of individuals and groups involved in HRA
work (Björkman et  al., 2014) with the goal to create knowledge relevant
to decision-makers in organizations.
Framing HRA as a practice of knowledge creation suggests conceptual
proximity to epistemic practices, denoting recurrent activities of developing,
acquiring, and validating knowledge (Knorr Cetina, 1999, 2005). Epistemic
practices are considered as objectual (Knorr Cetina, 2005) as they evolve
and form around epistemic objects, i.e. issues under investigation charac-
terized as unknown, or vaguely known, open-ended, and question-gen-
erating. An example of an epistemic object could be the question: Why
do people leave our organization? When practitioners work with epistemic
objects, they are on their way of becoming technical objects, i.e. fixed,
ready-at-hand objects that perform according to known regularities. A
technical object in HRA could be a diagram based on a statistical model
showcasing the drivers of employee attrition in a particular period.
Fueled by digitalization, epistemic practices heavily rely on a range
of technologies shaping how practitioners generate and present knowl-
edge. We refer to these technologies as epistemic technologies, defined
as instruments used to engage in the investigation, construction, and
presentation of knowledge (Anthony, 2018; Kaplan, 2011). Digital tech-
nologies discussed in the context of HRM, mostly referred to as elec-
tronic HRM (eHRM) technologies (Bondarouk & Ruël, 2009), usually
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 2625

support users to perform and monitor particular HRM tasks, such as

recruiting or talent management (Ellmer & Reichel, 2018). HRA projects
generating insights into a new business-related issue, however, require
technologies allowing practitioners to flexibly calculate, visualize, and
present analytical outputs (e.g. R or Tableau). In this paper, we focus
on the latter type of digital technology.

Research design and methods

Case selection and data collection
For gaining insights into how HRA practitioners shape HRA outputs
relevant according to the requirements of decision-makers, we conducted
a single case study (Eisenhardt, 1989) of an HRA team at TechCom, a
German MNC in the technology sector operating in 120 countries
worldwide. Based on media coverage, we expected TechCom to have
well-established HRA and searched for contact details of the company’s
HR department online. The HR department connected us with the HRA
team and after some email conversation we called Christopher, the team
leader, who gave us an extensive overview of the team’s workflows, their
skills and resources, and how these were developed in the past years.
Christopher and the rest of the team also proved to be very research
oriented and thus open to being observed in and asked about their
daily work. As our research interest lies in how HRA practitioners
mobilize particular skills and resources to create relevant analytical
outputs in daily practice, the HRA team presented a valuable case setting.
Proceeding from the first contact, the first author collected qualitative
data within a 7-month period triangulating several methods, including
formal semi-structured interviews, observations, and ad-hoc interviews,
mutually informing each other during the data collection process. Before
and during our observations, we conducted 13 scheduled open-ended,
semi-structured interviews (average duration more than one hour) at
relevant practice sites, including interviews with team members and
representatives of their ‘community of knowledge’ (see Figure 1, where
an [i] indicates a formal interview conducted with this person). Based
on a standardized interview guide we asked questions on how HRA
projects are organized, on collaborations with the team’s community of
knowledge, central technologies in-use, and how data protection and
the works council influence HRA practices.
Information gathered in the first semi-structured interviews informed
our subsequent observations. We collected over 90 h of non-participant
observation, including the observation of 23 meetings on running HRA
projects. While observations in the offices uncovered more mundane
activities of the team members, observations of meetings allowed us to
2626 M. ELLMER AND A. REICHEL

Figure 1.  The setting of HRA at TechCom including the position of interview partners.

observe the HRA team members interacting with each other. In 10 of

the observed meetings only members from the HRA team participated.
The other 13 were held with representatives of the team’s community of
knowledge, e.g. from the employee survey department, or internal experts,
such as from the German labor relations (see Table A1 in the Appendix
for details). The observations resulted in detailed observation journals
including minute details of single activities as well as minutes of salient
quotes caught during the interactions. During the first half of our obser-
vations, we were able to observe the HRA team preparing analytical
outputs for an upcoming quarterly board meeting. Accordingly, the whole
‘epistemic machinery’ (Kaplan, 2011) was working on a comparably high
level. In the second half, by contrast, the HRA practitioners were working
on a more routine level. Comparing and contrasting these different phases
allowed us inducting clear and saturated categories of epistemic practices
accomplished by the team members. During our observations, we con-
ducted six ad-hoc interviews (see ‘[ai]’ in Figure  1) in which team mem-
bers answered questions of understanding collected during the observations,
e.g. information on organizational structures, further details on their own
role, details on people they had called and discussed with, or background
information on projects mentioned during the meetings. Complementary
to the interviews, we analyzed a range of public documents, such as
videos and practitioner-oriented blog articles written by the HRA team
members for better contextualizing our observations.
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 2627

Finally, by conducting ad-hoc interviews and by presenting initial

preliminary findings of our data analysis to the HRA team at the end
of our observations we leveraged member checks (Lincoln & Guba,
1985) in our data interpretation. In particular, the comments and feed-
back of the team members allowed us for increasing the external validity
of our findings as we were able to interpret information obtained from
the interviews and observations in a more authentic manner in order
to avoid exaggerations in data presentation, etc.

Case setting: HRA at TechCom

Before describing how we analyzed the collected data, we briefly describe

the setting, i.e. the organizational context at TechCom, the overall struc-
ture and workflows related to HRA, as well as the skills and resources
identified at the HRA team.
At TechCom, HRM is generally considered as an important topic. As
tech companies are frequently in danger of facing severe talent shortages,
TechCom aimed to transform itself into a ‘people organization’ to attract
and retain critical talent. HRA practices were considered to support HR
decisions to reach this goal and were thus strongly promoted in the
past decade. Promoting HRA also resonated with a strong data-driven
culture at TechCom, demanding a style of decision-making based on
data and facts rather than personal experience or intuition (Rasmussen
& Ulrich, 2015). Data-driven decision-making was installed as a mind-
set in all HR operations, resulting in a strong obligation, but also pref-
erence, for quantitative types of knowledge for HR professionals at
TechCom (Greasley & Thomas, 2020). As an HR business partner
(HRBP) noted in an ad-hoc interview:
At TechCom, nobody gets anywhere without numbers, anyway. Somebody saying:
‘I have the feeling that this or this is the case’–that does not exist. (Sofia, HRBP)

This context provided a favorable position for the HRA practitioners

studied. Nonetheless, they had to put considerable effort in building up
HRA in its present form. Christopher, the HRA team leader who was deeply
involved in this building process, remembered a meeting about 10 years
ago, where they still had to pin printed analytics dashboards on pin boards.
In this meeting, a huge confusion in the figures presented occurred.
[A]nd then a lot of people left and said: Man, yes, it’s just that, HR never gets
the numbers in order! It’s all worthless what we’re doing here! (Christopher,
HRA team leader)

Since the HR function started to professionalize its HRA processes,

however, ‘such discussions are gone’ (Christopher) and the team perceives
2628 M. ELLMER AND A. REICHEL

that decision-makers now recognize the value of HRA. This positively

affects the overall recognition of the HR function at TechCom. As
Christopher, the team leader, described:
Meanwhile, we’ve reached the point where people say: Man, we need much, much
more analytics, because … everything is getting better somehow, and because then
we’ll have answers to our questions! (Christopher, HRA team leader)

How does HRA at TechCom work and what skills and resources are
present in these processes? Figure 1 (see above) provides an overview
over the most important actors involved in HRA practices at TechCom,
including the affiliation of our interview partners.
The HRA team at the very center is responsible for overseeing current
HRA projects, including the processing and delivery of analytical outputs.
All members have a high level of theoretical knowledge as well as
research and methods skills with more than a half of the team holding
a PhD degree in HRM or business psychology. For practicing HRA, the
team maintains star-like connections to a broad community of knowledge
including actors across TechCom as well as beyond organizational bound-
aries where professionals hold relevant expertise. For creating analytical
outputs, the HRA team has vivid exchange with data scientists specialized
in HRM at the AnalyticsCenter (AC) which have exclusive full access
to all data at TechCom as well as strong methods skills. When processing
outputs, the HRA team members and particularly the AC also have
regular exchange with regulatory actors, i.e. the works council and the
data protection office.
While the HRA team supports decision-makers at various levels (e.g.
the leaders of the HR Centers of excellence (CoEs), or line managers
at different levels) as well as HRBPs, we focus our analysis on how
team members create analytical outputs for the HR board member at
TechCom. When starting an analytical project, the team members have
some exchange with the board member in which they gather information
on the needs and requirements of the analytical outputs from the board
member’s perspective (this happened prior to our observations). Based
on these inputs, the HRA team conducts research related to the issue
at hand, collects related data, and runs analyses. If the analysis gives
insights into a recurring issue (e.g. prediction of employee attrition),
the team integrates the outputs into the HR board member’s standard
dashboard, showcasing statistics, diagrams, and figures on current and/
or strategically relevant HR issues.
In the past years, TechCom made considerable investments into its
technological infrastructure, including a highly reliable data base system
as well as data analysis and visualization software, including SAP and
open source systems. To ensure high data quality, data management is
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 2629

Table 1. Skills and resources related to HRA at TechCom.

Skills
Conceptual and theoretical
HRM/OB knowledge
Research and methods skills
Business savviness
Resources
Community of knowledge
Data and technology
Description
Knowing about concepts and theories from HRM and OB
Linking concepts to information needs of decision-makers
Referring to concepts in discussions with actors holding relevant
knowledge
Having inductive and deductive research and methods skills, like being
able to….
• formulate research questions and hypotheses
• interview decision-makers and actors holding relevant knowledge
• induct categories from qualitative information sources
• manage data deductively run quantitative statistical analyses
Being able to relate analytical outputs to financial KPIs
Description
Having access to a network of internal and external actors holding critical
knowledge (e.g. legal or functional expertise), skills (e.g. research and
methods skills), and resources (e.g. access to specific data)
Having access to sufficient quantity and quality of data
Having appropriate analytical and data visualization software available

centralized in the HR shard service center where employees standardize

and clean incoming data from various information systems. The data
visualization software in place allows building dashboards that present
real-time data through various elements (different diagrams, figures, text
fields, etc.) that can be easily integrated and exchanged. Data scientists
working in the AC can also integrate functions into the single dashboard
elements (e.g. a mouse-over function or adding filters). Table 1 sum-
marizes the most important skills and resources we found to be relevant
in the work of the HRA team members.

Data analysis

For identifying HRA-related practices for rendering HRA outputs relevant

at TechCom, we informed our data analysis by a Grounded Theory
coding approach, differentiating into the phases of open, axial, and
selective coding (Corbin and Strauss, 1990). In the first phase of open
coding, the HRA-as-practice approach directed our analytical focus to
the everyday activity in both its routine and improvised forms (Feldman
& Orlikowski, 2011). In particular, we looked out for certain sets of
activities of HRA practitioners and how they navigate relationships with
other practitioners and stakeholders in tandem with using different
technologies for crafting analytical outputs.
Based on our interest in how HRA practitioners render HRA outputs
relevant in their daily HRA praxis (Björkman et  al., 2014), we inducted
several practices related to conducting HRA which we summarized in
three practice dimensions: Reifying epistemic objects, crafting technical
objects, and adjusting technical objects. In a second round, we looked
out for activities and themes that supported or hindered the HRA
2630 M. ELLMER AND A. REICHEL

practitioners to render outputs relevant by identifying quotes and

observed activities related to their interaction with decision-makers and
other groups. This resulted in different practices of the HRA team
members as well as conditions in the organizational context at TechCom.
In the phase of axial coding, we structured the practices and condi-
tions in an integrated overview as proposed by Gioia et  al. (2013),
allowing us to leverage practices articulating theoretical relationships
between the themes discovered in the data (Feldman & Orlikowski,
2011). In the final phase of selective coding, we extracted those codes
and categories relevant for gaining insights for our research question
(see in Figure 2) and challenged our findings in light of extant literature
to create reasonable connections between data and existing literature.
Findings
As mentioned above, we focus our findings section on empirical illus-
trations where the HRA team created analytical outputs for the HR
board member at TechCom. To this end, we crafted small episodes from
our observational and interview data to elucidate the interplay of skills
and resources and the practices and themes connected to the theoretical
dimensions of interest (see Figure 2).

Rendering HRA outputs relevant by reifying epistemic objects

Reifying an epistemic object denotes HRA practitioners collecting infor-

mation for exploring possibilities and options for its representation as
a technical object. As mentioned above, the starting points for reifying
an epistemic object were either decision-makers or members of the HRA
team coming up with an HR issue, which at this stage is usually very

Figure 2.  Data structure.

 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 2631

undetermined, fuzzy, and question-generating. To ensure the relevance

of the epistemic object at this stage, team members assess and discuss
whether the issue relates to the overall strategy of TechCom as well as
to a sufficiently concrete business question. The team members stated
that value for decision-makers results from ‘staying close to business’
and their ‘immediate [business] decisions’ (Christopher) rather than just
digging into topics that appear interesting in from a research perspective.
As Sabrina explained:
(…) what I find important is solving concrete business issues and problems. It’s
not about us finding a topic cool and just doing our thing, but we have to solve
a problem from the business areas and work very closely with them. And only
then we actually create value (Sabrina, HRA team member).

If the epistemic object meets the criteria of addressing an actual

business problem, the members integrate the epistemic object into their
portfolio and start the reification process. A good example for reifying
an epistemic object during the observations was the ‘birth’ of a KPI for
the HR board member, as described in the following episode.
As structural reorganizations at TechCom increased in the past few years, the
HR board member asked the HRA team to integrate KPIs showing how reorga-
nizations affect the well-being and productivity of employees in his dashboard.
Two team members, Susan and Richard, were assigned with the task. They started
to theorize reorganizations by looking for definitions of reorganizations in aca-
demic and business consultation literatures and speculated what information and
theoretical constructs (i.e., dependent variables) could be most relevant for the
board member. After having a first idea of what reorganization is, they reached
out to a range of colleagues to gather knowledge, experience, and data related to
reorganizations. These included a colleague working at the German labor relations
department, a member of the employee survey team, and a colleague who was
involved in a reorganization process at TechCom in the past. After some meet-
ings, Susan and Richard had accumulated a considerably more complex picture
of reorganizations, thus adding new constructs and discarding existing ones to
their conceptualizations. They also had an overview over what kind of data was
available and learned about potential worries of the works council regarding
reorganizations. This information provided them with a better understanding
of what aspects of reorganizations could be relevant for the board member and
allowed them to develop first ideas on building appropriate KPIs.

As the episode shows, a first central practice of reifying an epistemic

object is theorizing information needs and ideas, terming a delocalization
and abstraction of HR/business issues into tangible and business-related
questions and models. In theorizing activities, team members mobilize
research and methods skills as well as conceptual and theoretical HRM/
OB knowledge and build on the resource of their access to a community
of knowledge, i.e. a network of internal and external actors providing
2632 M. ELLMER AND A. REICHEL

important knowledge to their issue at hand. Research and methods skills

allow team members for gathering information needs and requirements
of the decision-makers and to extend their knowledge on a particular
issue by talking to a range of internal and external experts. When
gathering information on the epistemic object at hand, linking HRM/
OB concepts and theory to the needs and requirements of decision-mak-
ers allows them to focus their analytical efforts as well as their discus-
sions with members of the community of knowledge. A second central
practice apparent in the episode is building epistemic resources. Again,
mobilizing research and methods skills, conceptual and theoretical HRM/
OB knowledge and leveraging the community of knowledge, team mem-
bers identify actors who have potentially interesting data related to the
information need of the board member. Collecting these resources some-
times requires harmonizing data, e.g. by streamlining underlying
definitions.
These HRA practices were closely related to the practice of boundary
spanning, i.e. linking the internal knowledge of the team on a particular
issue with external sources of information. By mobilizing their conceptual
and theoretical HRM/OB knowledge and research and methods skills,
practitioners frequently and systematically reached out to experts for
tapping their experience and knowledge related to the epistemic object
in question. Gathering these insights helped them to confront the infor-
mation needs and requirements of the board member with the actual
business reality, which directed their attention to important details to
be integrated in their theorizing.
Boundary spanning was also part of ensuring compliance of analytical
projects where the team members could rely on their community of
knowledge. Industrial relation laws and data protection laws in Europe
and Germany fundamentally shape HRA practitioners’ scope of action.
As implied in the episode, reifying epistemic objects needs a strong
consideration of compliance issues with two main regulatory groups at
TechCom, i.e. the works council and the data protection office (see
Figure 1). This mostly concerned negotiating the analytical outputs’
‘purpose’ of the information provided in the dashboards as the works
council had to acknowledge the purpose and use of each. As Christopher
outlined:
And of course [the works council] is concerned that we create the ‘fully trans-
parent employee’ and so on. So, at this point (…), we have to negotiate the
purpose of each single project. (Christopher, HRA team leader)

When we started our observations, however, this situation was eas-

ier–thanks to the community of knowledge: Una, an expert in the AC,
was able to negotiate an agreement by which KPIs with a purpose
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 2633

already negotiated could be integrated in any dashboard without the

works council’s confirmation. Each new KPI added, however, required
another confirmation by the works council.
Concerning data protection, HRA practitioners had to justify their
‘need-to-knows’ and the ‘business needs’ for which they utilized specific
data. To ensure compliance, Karen, an expert for HR data in the data
protection office, developed ‘blocking concepts’ based on these needs
to ensure that employees can only access the data they actually need
for their role. While complying with law, this also led to the HRA team
members having only limited access to data they would have needed
for checking the possibilities for presenting an epistemic object at hand.
As a result, the constant quest for legal compliance strongly affected
the team members’ scope of action for providing analytical outputs.

Rendering HRA outputs relevant by crafting technical objects

After having reified an epistemic object at hand, the HRA team members
move to crafting technical objects, i.e. building a first representation of
the epistemic object in question (i.e. ‘pre-technical objects’). In this
phase, the HRA practitioners mobilize skills related to research methods
and resources of high-quality data and technologies available, as well
as their access to their community of knowledge, particularly the data
scientists in the AC. The following episode gives insight into the crafting
of a technical object in the office of the HRA team.
Marco receives a call from Tim, a data scientist from the AC, to go through
some results Tim had calculated. When they explored drivers why people leave
TechCom (‘attrition drivers’) some time ago, China turned out to be somehow
puzzling compared to other countries and regions. In some prior meetings, they
had specified the research design and input variables for gaining a better under-
standing of the issue. Tim, who as a data scientist has full access to all data at
TechCom, has now run a random forest model based on the agreed input. In
the call, they go through the results and exchange their interpretations of the
patterns discovered. During the joint interpretation, Marco requests some ad-hoc
calculations and charts, e.g., results according to board area or hierarchical level.
Tim instantly delivers these calculations via screen transmission. Based on their
data explorations they conclude that payment seems to play the most important
role while age plays the most marginal. In the end, Marco instructs Tim how
to present some selected results for delivering them to the board member in a
tangible fashion.

As the episode shows, one central practice related to crafting technical

objects is specifying outputs. Specifying outputs requires a range of
research and methods skills, such as setting rationales and research
designs, and defining and selecting variables–in the case of the episode
above, the two practitioners did this up-front in various meetings. When
2634 M. ELLMER AND A. REICHEL

crafting dashboards, practitioners mainly discussed how to represent the

issue at hand in an appropriate form to the HR board member. Most
importantly, they debated what kind of diagrams (e.g. bar diagrams or
heat maps) would be most applicable and useful, especially in the
upcoming board meeting. A second and related practice when crafting
technical objects was processing outputs. As illustrated by the episode,
this, again, included research and methods skills such as exploring data,
calculating results, and jointly interpreting them. In case of crafting
dashboards presenting recurrently important HR issues, HRA team mem-
bers mainly discussed and identified the most appropriate form of issue
representation (e.g. what diagram suits best to present available data)
for decision-makers.
When crafting technical objects, HRA practitioners, again, extensively
drew on boundary spanning. In the episode, Marco reached out to Tim
with an HR issue at hand, who provided expertise in sophisticated data
science methods that allowed for generating deep insights into the issue
in question. At the same time, Marco had a good idea of what infor-
mation was actually relevant to the HR board member. As he told us
with a smile, data scientists, in deep love with data and visualizations,
would often craft diagrams with too much information. As a result, the
job of the HRA team is to guide them how to shape dashboards relevant
for decision-makers according to their information needs.
When crafting technical objects, establishing relevance was occasion-
ally hindered as HRA team members had to handle dependencies. For
instance, the blocking concepts enforced by data protection (see above)
led to HR data scientists having full access to all HR data while mem-
bers of the HRA team only had limited access. Team members were
sometimes also dependent on technical experts that could, e.g. solve an
issue related to a specific data base. As implied in the episode, con-
strained access to data again required boundary spanning practices for
crafting technical objects in a relevant fashion. In the observation period
before the board meeting, we noticed that suchlike dependencies jeop-
ardized HRA practitioners delivering the right figure with the right
numbers at the right time to important decision-makers. As Figure 2
indicates, HRA team members also had to consider political tensions
when crafting technical objects. We will detail out this condition in the
next subsection.

Rendering HRA outputs relevant by adjusting technical objects

After having processed technical objects–in most cases resulting in pro-

totypes of analytical outputs–HRA team members turned to adjusting
technical objects in accordance to the information needs of decision-makers,
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 2635

i.e. changing the shape of the analytical output in order to increase their
relevance. The following episode illustrates how team members coordinate
with other actors at TechCom to adjust technical objects.
Christopher receives a call from a colleague at the communications department.
The quarterly board meeting is just two days ahead and there is still need to
discuss some KPIs related to HR communication (showing, e.g., Twitter followers
or how often board members get retweeted) in the board member dashboard.
Christopher and the caller start discussions on whether certain function in the
latest dashboard interface would actually provide value, especially for the HR
board member, by recurrently putting themselves in their shoes. Christopher
reminds the caller that the board member may not have much time, and yet
he has to answer questions: ‘He wants to know: What is going well, what is
going bad? Where do we have to act? And if we have only one dashboard for
representing the issue, then we have to carefully consider the dramaturgy of the
figures, we have to arrange them in a way that he easily understands the results’.
He suggests: ‘We have this KPI here and this KPI here–and I would just merge
them. The board members are supposed to be the target audience. I am not
sure, if this is actually “board-relevant”’. Later he concludes: ‘I would just let the
retweets-KPI where it is, because this indicates that our board members are very
active and this is arguably an achievement related to one of our strategic goals’.

As illustrated by the episode, a first practice of adjusting technical

objects is adapting outputs. Adapting outputs required a good share of
business savviness on the side of the team members: Next to discussing
the final dramaturgy of the dashboard elements, team members also
chose a particular set of results and KPIs appearing as most relevant.
Selecting, emphasizing, consolidating, or deleting information was usually
based on the decision-makers’ perspectives gathered during the phase
of reifying the epistemic object, their own expertise and experience, as
well as correspondence with the strategic goals at TechCom.
Adapting outputs is closely connected to the epistemic practice of
customizing dashboards. Here, the affordances of the epistemic technol-
ogies in place played a key role as they allowed the flexible adoption
of the dashboard interface to customize analytical outputs towards the
needs expressed by the HR board member. In accordance with the
dramaturgy negotiated, for instance, team members added, changed, or
deleted figures and graphics in dashboards or integrated specific func-
tions (e.g. mouse-over or filter functions) in close cooperation with the
AC to give the HR board member the possibility to explore the presented
data on his own.
As indicated in the description of the setting at TechCom, another
important epistemic practice is speaking a language of numbers. This
required a good share of research and methods skills and, again, business
savviness. The team members accomplished this by fine-tuning their
analyses based on statistical methods and chose appropriate visualizations
2636 M. ELLMER AND A. REICHEL

in the final dashboards (also see ‘crafting technical objects’ above).

Speaking a language of numbers also enabled them to correspond to the
surrounding data-driven culture and the preference for quantitative knowl-
edge at TechCom. Another theme was HRA team members emphasizing
the relevance of integrating financial data into the outputs. As several
team members noted, showing financial impact is of particular relevance
for attracting the board members attention, again allowing them to lever-
age the pronounced data-driven culture at TechCom. As Sabrina outlined:
If you want the attention of the board, you’ve got to speak their language. (…) I
mean, HR is about the people, right? But if you can link People or HR Analytics
to what does this mean in financial terms–then you have a totally different dis-
cussion base. (Sabrina, HRA team meember)

As already mentioned, political tensions sometimes hindered practi-

tioners from rendering HRA outputs relevant in the course of adjusting
technical objects and also when reifying technical objects (see above).
Team members had to mediate between the interests of different CoEs
and subsequently find compromises on how to present figures in the
dashboards. This occurred, for instance, when single CoEs claimed to
be underrepresented in the dashboards as compared to other CoEs. As
two team members indicated in their interviews, CoEs sometimes try
to circumvent analytical projects as they do not want certain things to
be uncovered ‘in public’, making it difficult to access interesting and/
or necessary data. In such cases, HRA team members had to balance
between their professional view on how to craft rigorous and valuable
outputs, and the political logic of the single CoEs. The features of the
epistemic technologies allowing to customize the dashboards, again,
played a key role in resolving such tensions. For instance, HRA team
members balanced the number of KPIs between different CoEs to rep-
resent each in an appropriate proportion to others in the interface. From
their professional view, however, this hindered them rendering HRA
outputs relevant to the board member. Valeria remembered a recent
iteration in the board member’s dashboard:
That was very big thing in the end, because we had to involve many, many
political decisions. In other words, we couldn’t just say what we think makes
sense, how we’d like it to make sense, which KPIs would make sense in the story
flow. (Valeria, HRA team member)

Discussion and implications

Using an HRM-as-practice lens, we illustrated how practitioners mobi-
lized existing skills and resources in various epistemic practices to pro-
duce business relevant HRA outcomes. Based on these findings, we now
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 2637

Figure 3.  Practices and related mechanisms for rendering HRA outputs relevant.

theorize how HRA practitioners produce business relevant HRA outputs

(see Figure 3) and unearth, against the background of extant literature,
what skills and resources HRA practitioners mobilize in different phases
of transforming epistemic objects to technical objects. These insights
contribute to knowledge on how organizations can create effective HRA
and illustrate how digitalization processes change the work of HRM in
contemporary organizations.
Overall, we contend epistemic alignment, i.e. aligning to decision-mak-
ers’ perception of business reality when creating analytical outputs, as
central mechanism in building business relevant HRA outputs in-practice.
Epistemic alignment, accomplished through the epistemic practices of
boundary spanning, customizing dashboards, and speaking a language
of numbers, allows HRA team members for leveraging rich skills and
resources in producing complex analytical outputs, while at the same
time staying close to the decision-makers’ immediate business problems
and accounting for conditions in the broader organizational context (e.g.
compliance, dependencies, political tensions, and a data-driven decision
culture). In the following, we detail out these practices and conclude
with some practical propositions for each.
First, boundary spanning, i.e. linking the internal knowledge of the
team with external sources (i.e. experts form the community of knowl-
edge), was very present and important in the HRA practices observed,
particularly in the phases of reifying epistemic objects and crafting
2638 M. ELLMER AND A. REICHEL

technical objects. When reifying epistemic objects, the HRA practitioners

established numerous touch points with their community of knowledge
across diverse functional departments which presented a critical resource
for creating business relevant outputs. To frame discussions with this
community in a meaningful way, team members mobilized their knowl-
edge on HRM/OB theory (e.g. by drawing on common theoretical con-
cepts during the discussions) and well as a range of qualitative research
and methods skills to effectively gather information on the requirements
of the analytical outputs as well as the possibilities of creating them.
These included finding and iteratively developing a suitable ‘sample’ of
interview partners, preparing some targeted questions for the interviews,
and inducting conclusions from the information gained. In the phase
of crafting technical objects, team members mainly mobilized their
quantitative research and methods skills when spanning boundaries to
data scientists in the AC. This allowed the team members to integrate
distributed expertise and skills in terms of methods and interpretation
skills into the analytical process. Leveraging internal and external exper-
tise from the community of knowledge further helped HRA teams to
resolve, or at least anticipate, a broad range of functional, legal, technical,
and political challenges associated with HRA project as well as to handle
critical internal dependencies (e.g. in terms of data access).
In the light of extant literature, these findings confirm the importance
of theoretical knowledge and research and methods skills as well as the
resources of high-quality data, high-quality analytical technologies and
access to a multi-disciplinary community of knowledge (Boudreau &
Cascio, 2017; Levenson, 2017; Minbaeva, 2018; Rasmussen & Ulrich,
2015). What our findings add is showing how HRA practitioners mobi-
lize conceptual and theoretical HRM/OB knowledge and their qualitative
and quantitative research and methods skills to span productive con-
nections to the community of knowledge. In the process of reifying an
epistemic object, theoretical knowledge, research and methods skills,
and access to a multi-disciplinary community of knowledge ensure
effective knowledge generation on an HR issue at hand which presents
an important basis for crafting business relevant outputs. Based on this,
we propose:
Proposition 1: Generating business relevant HRA outputs requires effective bound-
ary spanning on the side of an HRA team. Effective boundary spanning can be
accomplished by mobilizing a) knowledge on HRM/OB theory b) qualitative and
quantitative research and methods skills, and c) access to a multi-disciplinary
community of knowledge.

In the phase of adjusting technical objects, the epistemic practices of

customizing dashboards and speaking a language of numbers were very
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 2639

present. By customizing dashboards, team members adapted analytical

outputs towards the needs expressed by the HR board member, ensuring
compliance, and balancing political tensions (especially between different
CoEs). Here, team members primarily mobilized their business savviness
and the resources of high-quality data and analytics technology. When
adapting technical objects, practitioners also leveraged a language of
numbers in terms of providing sophisticated statistical outputs as well
as integrating financial indicators in the outputs.
These findings are consistent with extant HRA literature suggesting
that high-quality data and analytical technologies and business savviness
are critical to ensure effective HRA (e.g. Angrave et  al., 2016; Minbaeva,
2018). Our findings add two important nuances. First, they highlight
the central role of the epistemic technologies’ particular features with
regards to their adaptability, that is, the possibilities to adapt and
exchange different elements in the visualization of analytical outputs
(such as figures and diagrams). These features, on the one hand, allowed
to align the data outputs in accordance to the needs of the decision-mak-
ers as well as to conditions in the wider organizational contexts (par-
ticularly political tensions). On the other hand, adaptability affordances
turned out as important in the iterative and experimental process of
transforming epistemic objects to technical objects: As apparent in many
meeting discussions, complex analytical projects required a constant
back-and-forth to explore what results are the most relevant to deci-
sion-makers and much experimentation how to present them in the
best way. Based on this, we argue:
Proposition 2: Generating business relevant HRA outputs requires an HRA team
having the ability to customize analytical outputs and speaking a language of
numbers. This requires HRA team members to mobilize a) quantitative research
and methods skills b) analytical technologies that allow for adapting analytical
outputs in accordance to decision-makers’ information needs and conditions in
the organizational context (e.g., compliance issues or political tensions) and b)
business savviness for relating HRA outcomes to financial outcomes.

Our findings further add that speaking a language of numbers is

tightly connected to a data-driven decision culture present in the wider
organizational context (also see Minbaeva, 2018). In the case of TechCom,
there was a general obligation to use data for decisions, creating norms
of knowledge creation and usage at TechCom (Feldman & March, 1981).
HRA practitioners, in accordance, strongly attended to this data-driven
culture by applying complex quantitative methods and speaking a lan-
guage of numbers, particularly in financial terms, when creating ana-
lytical outputs. This resulted in an interesting interplay: The prevailing
culture not only obliged the HR function to speak a language of numbers
2640 M. ELLMER AND A. REICHEL

but also created a favorable, ‘absorptive’ environment for HRA as it also

obliged decision-makers at TechCom to use the HRA outputs created
by the team. In summary, this cultural obligation created a high level
of legitimacy for the HRA at TechCom.

Limitations and future research

Next to the usual limitations of a single case study approach (limited
generalizability and construct validity) we see two further important
limitations of our approach, paving some avenues for future research.
First, albeit we have shown how HRA team members shape HRA out-
puts in accordance to prior inputs of decision-makers, we still know
little about how decision-makers assess the analytical outputs and how
they use them. Future research could thus shed light on whether and
how this group integrates HRA outputs into their decision-making. This
integration may look very different for managers at different levels (e.g.
line managers at different levels, heads of the CoEs, board members,
etc.). Further, the role of HRBPs in these integration processes is yet
to discover. Putting more attention to the role of decision-makers in
HRA may also give answers to the question whether practicing HRA
conveys a raise in the power and status of HRM in an organization
(Greasley & Thomas, 2020). While our data indicates an overall positive
perception and recognition of the HR function at TechCom, open ques-
tions remain to what extent HRA affects the power and status of the
HRA team itself and how this feeds back into the certain groups of HR
practitioners (e.g. HRBPs), the organizational HRM function, and the
field of HRM in general.
Second, the HRA team studied was equipped with a particular set of
skills and resources critical for building effective HRA. However, HRA
practitioners across organizations may not hold the same set of skills
and may not be provided with the same set of resources. In future
research, integrating HRA teams in different organizations and applying
a configurational perspective could shed light on what skills, resources,
practices, and contextual factors actually matter. A configurational
approach would particularly allow for identifying configurations of skills,
resources, practices, and contextual factors that–as a bundle–increase
the chances of the respective HRA practitioners to generate business
relevant HRA. These configurations or bundles denote multidimensional
constellations of ‘conceptually distinct characteristics that commonly
occur together (…)’ (Meyer et  al., 1993, p. 1175). From these consistent
configurations of skills, resources, practices, and contextual factors, typ-
ically those linked to favorable outcomes (like business relevant HRA)
can be identified. In this way, interactions of various important factors
 The International Journal of Human Resource Management 2641

for building business relevant HRA by means of HR-related technology

can be considered (Strohmeier & Kabst, 2014).

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the HR Analytics team presented in this paper for inviting us
to data collection. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this
special issue for their constructive criticism and suggestions. Further, we want to thank
the attendees at various conferences and workshops where we presented earlier versions
of the paper and especially to Ewald Kibler (Aalto University) for his vital input and
feedback.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Markus Ellmer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3344-9974
Astrid Reichel http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4188-360X

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