EXPEDIA GROUP TECHNOLOGY — INNOVATION
Powering People's Data with an Enterprise Platform
How technology can supercharge HR
For many companies, its people are its most valuable assets. However, often this does not translate to investing and maintaining the technology that supports employees. HR functions that support important processes like Payroll, Benefits and Recruiting are frequently the least examined component of the corporate tech stack, but to be successful in today’s business environment, HR must be integrated into the commercial business strategy. HR technology teams can be a key catalyst for this — as our team at Expedia Group™️ has shown with our recent work on the technology powering our people data.
Where we started
For years, Expedia Group’s HR technology team operated its own on-premise Structured Query Language (SQL) servers, with its own data infrastructure team, data development team and data architects. Development was slow, data quality issues were rampant, and the team struggled to move beyond basic reporting and the occasional dashboard, never being able to help business leaders with big strategic decisions around employee behavior, retention/attrition, or talent intelligence. Not only was this incredibly costly and inefficient, but it also continually separated HR data priorities from commercial ones.
How we shifted
After reaching out to our technology leaders, we found that not only were they willing to help, but they had already been working to standardize how teams across the company could leverage the power of a common platform to improve organizational efficiency.
The HR team joined this initiative and set out on an 18-month journey to transition all our people's data from a legacy on-premise HR database to a modern, AWS-based cloud data lake solution. As we built, we started to see dashboards that used to take over 30 days to update being updated in just a few days or data obfuscation jobs that used to take weeks to be accomplished in a few hours. For the first time, the HR Technology team was using modern, enterprise-grade data tools to process and analyze people's problems and saw major efficiency wins at half the operational cost.
Through the support of data platform engineers, we architected data flows, onboarded to common platform services, and reduced our maintenance and support burdens. This allowed us to focus our HR Technology team efforts on specific data nuisances and give us more time to focus on other high-priority projects.
What we learned
HR is enterprise-wide — When we stopped acting on an HR-only strategy and adopted the enterprise-wide technology approach, we became an integral part of the corporate roadmap and ended up providing more value to the company by focusing on our HR-specific subject matter expertise.
Highlight the benefits of operating at scale — We need to continue to remind our organization and leaders of the benefits of being part of a common platform. Data dictionary capabilities with Alation, Access Management through Apache Ranger, and metadata storage engines leveraging Hive; there are countless out-of-the-box benefits from leveraging data platform services that teams can seamlessly inherit when they align to a larger technology vision.
Level up from reporting data to providing insights — Leveraging the power of an advanced data platform is only worth it if you use that data to drive value. Having strong partnerships with functions like People Analytics, Employee Listening & Design and HR Business Partners who use the data and tell the story is the true value driver of the underlying technology work.
Today we are providing more business insights than ever. Fairness & bias detection, productivity & habits, and in-depth retention studies have become a routine part of our business rhythms. And in addition to delivering dashboards and analytics, we are expanding into simulators, predictive modeling, trend detection and machine learning, all by leveraging the same data platform that powers the world’s largest travel company. This work has helped us reprioritize the team’s workload and most importantly, better support our people at Expedia Group.
