Mathematical Modeling Used To Track and Label

Anti-Globalism writes to tell us that in a new book titled The Numerati, author Stephen Baker introduces us to some of the math wizardry that is used to label or track our movements through purchases, phone calls, internet usage and other habits. "One of the most promising laboratories for the Numerati is the workplace, where every keystroke, click, and e-mail can be studied. In a chapter called "The Worker," Baker travels to IBM, where mathematicians are building predictive models of their own colleagues. An excerpt: 'Samer Takriti, a Syrian-born mathematician. He heads up a team that's piecing together mathematical models of 50,000 of IBM's tech consultants. The idea is to pile up inventories of all of their skills and then to calculate, mathematically, how best to deploy them. I'm here to find out how Takriti and his colleagues go about turning IBM's workers into numbers. If this works, his team plans to apply these models to other companies and to automate much of what we now call management.'"

Comments

Not a chance.

[aadvancedGIR]

If managemenet was really about optimizing resources, it would have been outsourced a long time ago.

As a non-manager, I can tell you the most important job of management is to deal with the unquantifiable: engineers need to feel unique and usefull and they need opportunities to work on new things (and/or be promoted) from time to time. A good manager knows his guys are much more than their previous experiences (and somtimes slightly less too).

Re:Not a chance.

[slim]

All true. But parts of IBM (and I'm sure the rest of the corporate world) have already forgotten that.

I used to work there, and there was a big effort on to have employees maintain a 'skills' database. It was clear that despite running top class courses on teams, there were influential people in the corporation who saw staff as being nothing more than a set of D&D type stats who could be deployed like pawns.

And hey, the losses in morale, effectiveness and customer satisfaction might be offset by the cost reductions. Who knows. I'm just glad I don't work there any more. (Which is quite lucky, because I didn't resign - my business unit was sold).

Re:Not a chance.

[Mark_in_Brazil]

I've never worked at IBM, but I've known people who did, including my ex-wife, back when we were married.
I'm not sure about elsewhere, but here in Brazil, IBM attracts employees. One is by being multinational tech giant. People who value stability and like to say they're in a big company (there's a lot more of that than I ever would have imagined) are attracted by that image. Back in 2000, when my then-wife was at IBM, I knew one person (a woman, but not my then-wife) who got PMP certification and had done a lot of training at IBM, and was getting a lot of attention from headhunters. She was given the opportunity to interview for a job with twice (TWICE) the salary of the job she then had at IBM, but didn't even try to find out more about the company or go to the interview because, in her words, "I've already got a nice little career at IBM, so I'm going to stay." My first thought was that IBM, like most other publicly traded companies, would "downsize" by purging a four- or five-digit number of jobs, and would do it without blinking. That is, IBM would be nowhere near as loyal to this person and thousands like her as she was being to IBM. The thing is that I realized she believed her job was safe because the company is big, and if I had said what I was thinking, we would end up in an argument how well her job at IBM might weather tough times, and her image of IBM's stability was much too deeply rooted for me to change it.
The other thing about IBM that attracted people to work there is that IBM was known for giving its employees lots of training. Here in Brazil, a lot of tech people I met made frequent mentions of "Faculdades IBM" (roughly, "IBM University"). It was a place you went and earned a salary while learning new skills and new technologies free. Yes, the salary was less than you could earn at another job, but the training made it worthwhile, because after a few years at IBM, you could find a much higher-paying job with your new skills and experience. IBM was kinda screwing up by letting its employees get away, and that was largely because annual salary adjustments for loyal employees were small enough that even some of the stability-seekers were tempted to look elsewhere.
When I was back in the US for the last time before moving to Brazil, which means somewhere between April and June of 2000, I met a friend of friends who was working at IBM somewhere in California. I told him about the "IBM University" image the company had in the Brazilian high-tech market. He told me it was similar in the US. I mention that it was only one person, because this may not be generally true, but in the view of this one friend of my friends, it was. In fact, he told me he was earning a lot less than similarly-qualified friends, and some had even tried to get him to go and work with them, but he had a multi-year plan involving lots of training and experience at IBM before hitting the job market. He wanted to have a resume with training and experience that would get him the job he wanted without the job-hopping approach his friends were taking. Again, this was what one IBM employee told me in 2000, so I don't want to generalize.

All the problems mentioned in the parent post, plus some real jerks who were managers, plus some really ridiculous rules imposed on employees (gawd, the e-mails parodying those rules were hilarious, and I knew enough people at IBM Brasil to get several copies of each), contributed to IBM Brasil's less-than-ideal work environment. But IBM was able to keep recruiting even good employees because the employees, for one reason or another, believed it was worth dealing with that. The people whose thinking was stuck in Brazil's more unstable economic past valued the perceived stability of having a job at IBM and being able to proudly tell people they worked at an enormous company enough to deal with the negative aspects of working there. I'm the opposite of these "corporate size queens;" I never liked working at a company larger than a given size. Given

Re:Not a chance.

[MurphyZero]

I switch jobs about every two years. I too enjoy the ability to learn something new and/or get out of something boring.

Re:Not a chance.

[Phat_Tony]

Management is largely about optimizing resources, but of the tradeoffs management must consider, only some of them can be quantified numerically at all. The decisions managers have to make are often that of weighing something easily quantifiable and incredibly precise against something hopelessly vague and unquantifiable, which a computer will have no chance whatsoever of grappling with until we have strong AI. There's a pervasive trend in management to put undue weight on the quantifiable aspects of business, when it's a common fallacy to beleive something should be weighted more highly simply because it's quantifiable.

Here's just one tiny example of the kind of decision management has to weigh: setting service-level goals for a call center. Most call centers measure and target a service level, defined as answering [x]% of their incoming calls in [y] seconds or less. There's a tremendous amount of exceedingly tricky mathematical modeling that can be done to determine how to staff best to meet service level efficiently, and super-advanced computer programs could play a huge roll in improving this. And good computer modeling can create a beautiful and accurate graph of exactly how much it costs the company to run different service levels. But the key management problem here is setting the target service level, and while you can quantify, model, and analyze the costs of providing that service level intricately, and smart management can optimize that out the wazoo and bring ever lower costs to providing the same service level, it's almost impossible to gather the tiniest shred of evidence regarding the benefits of different service levels.

Sure, we all know what the benefits are- how many people get sick of waiting and call another company? How many do so subconsciously? How many only do so after years? How many of your customers tried another company once, and made the connection that that company provides poor customer service because the wait on the phone was so much longer, or switched because it was so much shorter, or the opposite- competitor's customers who did or did not switch to you because of the same? How much money did you save in returns or less complaint calls because you had built up goodwill by always answering the phone fast and not keeping your customers waiting? How about trying to quantify the mental health benefit to your own sales force from having happier, less irate customers, because they weren't kept on hold interminably before you answered? You have no hope of quantifying the benefits, but you must set some service level, based upon your intricate analysis of costs and NO IDEA what the benefits are.

And almost every aspect of business if FULL of decisions like this.

I used to manage a call center, and we answered 97% of calls in 18 seconds or less- that's three rings. There was no computer answering system, and no queue except the ringing. When we went to call-center industry conventions, people literally wouldn't believe that any major call center ran service levels that high, and if they believed it, they'd tell us we were insane, that that service level represents an unconscionable waste of resources. For comparison, many companies had targets more like 60% of calls in 10 minutes or less, with a computer holding queue. Some government departments (I'm not kidding) had goals of 50% of calls answered period- that is, answered before the caller bailed out of the holding queue by giving up, with no time factor.

We strongly disagreed that we were significantly overspending on service level, but there wasn't anything to even say to argue about it- the value of a good customer service experience is just ridiculously difficult to quantify. But even at that company, I routinely saw people making the kind of mistake we felt companies who kept their customers on hold forever were making- they tend to move in bias of the information they can quantify. Some manager goes to a meeting of higher-ups and says "I found out how we can save $6 million a yea

an excellent way to reduce the quality of workers

[thermian]

Actually, a lot of consultants are highly skilled people who do not have to work for any one person.

Automate their management, and you'll start making them feel like factory workers. Smart people are far less likely to accept inflexible working conditions. The result will be that they walk.

I know I would. My consultancy work is expensive, and I insist on doing what I want, when I want, for who I want. Ok, I'm picky, but I'm happy and I enjoy what I do, so the quality of my work remains high.

If someone started dictating things I had to do based on a mathematical model, I'd go elsewhere for a more relaxed environment.