Most organizations waste money on programs that don't matter and miss opportunities for growth because the organizations might be long on data, but are consistently short on insight. 

On the workforce side, an organization typically has the following information: mountains of data from employee surveys; detailed records of employees' training from learning management systems; and voluminous records on hiring, absenteeism, and turnover from human resource information systems.

On the operations side, there is typically a wide array of key performance indicators available, including data on customer satisfaction, productivity, safety, quality, and sales.

Workforce analytics is a methodology for creating insight from data by merging some of these data sources and applying straightforward statistical tools (such as those used in six sigma) to identify the human drivers of both "intermediate" outcomes (such as employee turnover) and business outcomes (such as sales). 

This approach allows the "people side" of the business to be run the way the rest of the business is run - no longer relying simply on conventional wisdom, intuition, or hope.  It enables organizations to grow by knowing and focusing on the key human drivers of their performance.