In case you missed the announcement, UKG has recently released UKG Dimensions™ Data Hub. In the first part of our miniseries, we introduced UKG Dimensions Data Hub. Like any new solution, we’ve been seeing some questions on Data Hub, and that usually means there are many more people out there looking for answers of their own. I’m going to use this next part of the Data Hub blog series to talk about Data Hub and some of my experiences in the industry with it so far.
What is Data Hub?
Data Hub is one of the ways UKG democratizes access to your people data. We’ve developed an enterprise-grade data warehouse in the Google Cloud where you can access this people data from UKG Dimensions. There, in Google BigQuery, you can report on, analyze, and send your data to your favorite BI tool for more workforce and HR analytics insights. This data includes your time and attendance, scheduling, volume, employee information, and more. If you want to get a full look at the data you can expect to find, you should setup a meeting with your customer success manager.
One of the best parts is that Data Hub is included with the UKG Dimensions Analytics entitlement. If you have Analytics, you have Data Hub. Instead of going into all the details in this blog, I’m going to jump into talking about what my experiences using it alongside our early adopters. You can find out more about Data Hub by checking out its Product Profile.
Data Hub in action
What does this mean for you if you’re an analyst or manager of people data? Your data will likely be closer at hand, with the capacity to use new technologies like Google Cloud’s statistical learning functions or the public data sets, to help answer your outstanding business questions.
I heard recently about how the union of UKG Dimensions workforce data and the public data available in the Google Cloud lets our customers think more creatively. The example I heard hits close to home to many of us at the UKG headquarters in Massachusetts—snowstorms. Imagine you're managing a manufacturing line where you need fifty employees to fill the shift. This isn’t a job your employees can transition to do remotely. How will the impending ten inches of overnight, wet snow impact your employees’ ability to be at work on time the next day? On an individual basis, absence or tardiness would be almost impossible to predict. But, over a large group of employees, we can begin to make some informed estimates. We can do this by taking prior storm data and putting it up against the absences or tardiness from our workforce data and learning from the resultant patterns. Now, you have the data and computing power to make decisions about how to adjust your manufacturing schedule.
As one of UKG’s data scientists, I am extremely excited about this update for UKG Dimensions. Data Hub is not changing what data you can access, but it is changing how you access it. Prior to Data Hub, if you wanted to look at data outside of the product, you probably had your eye on the APIs we’ve built in. In fact, Data Hub is built directly from these data extract APIs and couldn’t exist without them. But building an entire data warehouse with these APIs that handles the logic of updating and refreshing the data—it’s a big lift for any organization. That’s where Data Hub comes in. It’s the data warehouse for your people data, enterprise approved and ready to be deployed.
Using the APIs directly continues to be the best choice for many use cases. Any time you want to stream data, inserting or changing data in your tenant, or want to integrate Dimensions into another platform, the API is how this is done. Data Hub’s specialization is in analyzing certain historical data in bulk.
As a longtime SQL user, I feel right at home querying in Data Hub using the SQL I know and love. It lets me jump right in and start solving problems. This is what I mean by Data Hub democratizing our people data. It puts it right back in the hands of the analysts at your organization that are intimately familiar with SQL. If you’re an analyst and you look fondly on the day when you could connect to the Workforce Central database and see all the data in front of you, Data Hub is the UKG Dimensions solution that will delight you.
There’s a lot more to write about, so in a forthcoming miniseries, the Industry Insights Blog will explore some of the ways that we’ve seen our Data Hub early adopters make use of the platform. We’ll explore some use cases and hope to create a spark of innovation for you, too.
To learn more, check out the Data Hub Product Profile.
