IBM’s Focus on Metrics

Business Week has a very interesting article by Stephen Baker based on his book The Numerati on the use of metrics in business. It describes how IBM is gathering and using data on its workers.

The data IBM is examining includes resumes (for skills), project records (experience) online calendars (use of time), cell phone use and emails (how employees communicate and with whom)–everything but personnel files, which are off limits. An example of the expected use of the data is to enable the creation of global teams that include a specific mix of skills, experience and work styles.

I immediately thought of this article when I heard Dan Prieto, another IBM’er at last week’s annual meeting of the Intangible Asset Finance Society. Dan is Vice President and Senior Fellow for Homeland Security and Intelligence at IBM’s Global Leadership Initiative. He made the statement that 85% of corporate data is trapped in silos where it cannot be accessed by other parts of a company, let alone by a company’s business partners. He also said that data visualization will someday be as important as a browser is to us today.

At first blush, the idea of accessing deep data on knowledge workers seems scary. But it is no different than the work that was done to turn industrial production into more of a science by measuring and managing each step in a manufacturing process. Clearly, there is a need for definitions (and enforcement) of privacy standards. But the need for new metrics is obvious once you come to see (as we have at IAC) an organization’s intellectual capital as its “factory,” with individual processes being the “production lines”  of today’s organization.