I first heard this term used at the Tableau Conference a few years ago. In one of their first HR tracks, I attended every presentation remotely close to the intersection of HR and Tableau. The disclaimer from every presenter at the start included a blurb that we weren’t looking at real data. I would have cringed had I not heard this. One presenter though introduced the term ‘fata’ – fake data. I’ve adopted it since.
In the pursuit of sharing ideas in the space of People Analytics, one hurdle is the extremely sensitive nature of the actual data we’re working with. Names, emails, gender, age, social security numbers, and much more are all often part of an employee data file and useful in analysis. However, sharing this information is not proper and could result in you losing your job in people analytics. Especially outside your organization, but even within, the information must be protected from those who shouldn’t have access.
This tutorial will show a few ways in which you can create this data. Useful for development, sharing internally, and presenting your work to the work – without losing your job.
Using one of these options you’ll have the ability to create a complete data set, quickly, and without exposing any real user or employee data.
view on github
Photo by Mohsin Khusro on Unsplash
