BusinessWeek writer Stephen Baker has an intriguing new book out, Numerati. First there was Taylorism – scientific management, then the Fordist assembly line, Deming and quality management, the Toyota Production system, now IBM is working on statistical tools that essentially match people to tasks. I was astounded by how far this has progressed. Click here for the excerpt.
Do you think these tools will actually work to increase productivity and performance in the creative economy? And even if they do, what is their impact on creative workers and on work-life?
September 3rd, 2008 at 4:36 pm
It’s funny, Richard. When Pierre Haren was describing the dawning of the assembly line for knowledge workers, I was remembering a discussion I had with you 10 years ago at CMU. We were talking about information tech and the transformation of the Rust Belt. By the way, really enjoyed Creative Class I and II. I think these Numerati add dramatically to the height of the world’s spiky regions.
September 4th, 2008 at 12:16 am
At a much simpler level, we can already do numerical prediction of job placement for the work-force at large. There is a high correlation between an individual’s literacy-level and their job functioning. If you want to know an individual’s advancement potential when entering the workforce, merely ask the individual to read out aloud a chart such as that at http://www.lexile.com/uploads/PDF’s/LexileMapColor_4-4-07_11×17.pdf – start from somewhere near the bottom. Then reference the highest coherent reading level to http://www.rasch.org/pm/pm2-39.pdf – and do notice the “income” graph!
September 4th, 2008 at 8:51 am
My first reaction was that the quality of management at IBM must be quite poor if they think this will be a big improvement. The example given — of a manager assembling a remote-site team out of a pool of hundreds of people she doesn’t know well, if at all — does make something like this sound useful, but I question how widespread that sort of thing is.
In a workplace where the manager assigning people to tasks knows all the people involved, I’m skeptical this sort of system can do better. E-mail isn’t just about mathematically modelled connections — there’s tone and subtext that the system will probably miss. And it can’t track impromptu face-to-face conversations, which are the strongest connections of all.
A good manager will give an employee stretch tasks based on their potential and interests; this system seems like it’d tend towards pigeon-holing people onto tasks they’d done well in the past. It might avoid building terrible teams, but I bet it’ll never build a great, game-changing team either. Plus, isn’t knowing your every move will be watched and analyzed about one of the worst recruiting pitches you can imagine? I sure wouldn’t want to work there.
September 4th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
There is more to this. If you look at Business Week September 8 2008, they have a cover story about Managing by the Numbers. IBM can track every second of a persons work time and relate it to productivity. Bingo.
September 5th, 2008 at 7:16 am
Steve – Thanks for checking in. I indeed remember those conversations CMU very vividly. You are breaking important new ground in understanding the management and control of knowledge workers.
September 21st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Richard, you might be interested in Cory Doctorow’s short story ‘The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away’: http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=story&id=2993