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Chapter 7 156 The business value of the insights generated by people analytics projects in practice has not been sufficiently established, quantified, or proven yet. To my knowledge, only three scientific studies have empirically examined the benefits of people analytics. One study indeed demonstrated that people analytics can benefit organizational performance, but only when an effective HRIS and the right incentives are in place (Aral et al., 2012). While the other two studies found a positive relationship between people analytics capabilities and performance, this involved the individual performance of HRM professionals (Kryscynski et al., 2017) and the strategic performance of HRM departments (Lawler & Boudreau, 2015). Hence, the scientific evidence for the claimed operational benefits of people analytics seems limited. Similarly, voices in practice increasingly question the value of people analytics. For example, Andersen (2017) discussed the field’s infancy, criticizing the overly optimistic claims of impact that go round. Rasmussen and Ulrich (2015) provokingly caution that people analytics may simply be a fad, pointing to the lack of “ analytics about analytics ” that could demonstrate its value (Rasmussen & Ulrich, 2015, p. 237). I understand that quantifying of the benefits of people analytics can be a challenge, as it is hard to quantify the value of accurate management information. Nevertheless, people analytics teams could more purposefully explore and monitor the business consequences after finishing a project or after HRM practices or policies are changed based on their recommendations. More evidence of how operational results are affected or of the ways in which HRM decision-making improved because of people analytics would help to substantiate the business case for people analytics. Without evidence for its added value, I expect people analytics to disappear as a separate function in the future. Other professionals in the field share these expectations (see Andersen, 2017; Van den Heuvel & Bondarouk, 2017). Most probably, people analytics will be integrated in a centralized cross-functional analytics function that is responsible for organization-wide analytical initiatives, irrespective of discipline and focus area. On the bright side, there could be great efficiency gains in having one big analytics function instead of multiple teams dispersed across HRM, marketing, finance and operations, doing the same thing (Andersen, 2017). A centralized team will be better able to combine multiple data sources and approach business cases and opportunities from different perspectives. Moreover, a centralized team could help to overcome the boundaries and barriers which the HRM function faces with regard to advanced analytics (Angrave et al., 2016). On the dark side, if people analytics were to move to a centralized team, projects aimed at HRM processes could be overlooked. HRM-related projects would compete with other, potentially more business-relevant and impactful projects in other functional domains. Moreover, if the HRM department would no longer be actively involved in analytical initiatives, employee interests could be overlooked. The potential ethical implications hereof, I discussed earlier.