Data Mining Moves To Human Resources

theodp writes "Just when you thought annual reviews couldn't get worse, BusinessWeek reports that HR departments at companies like Microsoft and IBM are starting to use mathematical analysis to determine the value of each employee. At an undisclosed Internet company, analysis of (non-verbal) communications was used to produce a circle to represent each employee — those determined to generate or pass along valuable info were portrayed as large and dark-colored circles ('thought leaders' and 'networked curators'), while those with small and pale circles were written off as not adding a hell of a lot. 'You have to bring the same rigor you bring to operations and finance to the analysis of people,' explains Microsoft's Rupert Bader. Hey, who could argue with what Quants did for finance?"

Comments

We'll all be gaming this before too long.

[tjstork]

I would joke that this could be a good thing, in that, we'll just game the review system to get raises.

The reality is, though, that the more corporations seek to control and monitor their employees, the more they will crush the entrepreneur in them. Corporations work best when they motivate people and you do that by creating a positive, team culture that gives its participants a sense of mission. Take that away, reduce people to cogs, and you are going to get cogs as a result, and you'll get an inevitable decline. What enterprising person would want to work as an anonymous cog, coming out of college with a degree and history that says they are anything but, when they could make a real difference at a startup.

Actions like this doom large corporations, and frankly, this sort of thinking was what alienated the big 3 for a lot of people, and now they want to do this to the computer industry?

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Re:Yes it is...

[Kjella]

There's a huge and erroneous misconception that centralization makes a corporation more efficient. I think centralization is a cancer. (...) The fact of the matter is, that the thing that matters most in any corporation is time to market. It doesn't matter if you are centralized and more "efficient" if it takes you two years longer to ship a late product out the door, because while your smaller competitors were signing stuff and building things, your own design was going through committees and signoffs to make sure that you weren't doing what someone else already did.

Let's try with a little IT analogy (shocking, I know). The "everyone do their own little thing" are the dreaded small VBA applications hacked up in Excel that have no architecture, no signoffs and just pop up all over the place. Or the IT networks where companies are on five different versions of Office and Exchange in a million configurations all running on wildly different hardware and environments depending on what the local IT guru at the time found at Best Buy. I've been in projects where we gathered up the investments being done in all the different business units and realized several of them were working on projects for the same thing because noone had any idea what the others were doing.

On the other hand, I've also been where using an unapproved application or making a configuration required sign-offs to make the Vogons proud. I haven't been that much into beurocratic application development but I'm sure there's places you go crazy over trying to get a change through the archtiectural review subcomittee to get the interface in the common corporate component toolkit changed. Funamentally it's the same challenge the MBAs have, how much should we have a central control and how much should we let everyone do their own thing. It's easy to be an armchair MBA and think you got all the answers because you don't see the actual implications. I'm sure there's many MBAs that think they'd make great IT policy too.