Wal-Mart, Kellogg, and any other company with good information systems and sophisticated analytics will tend to out-compete their foe. And that analytics discipline also makes it possible for human resources to analyze your every corporate movement, from emails and instant messages to office time and phone calls. CIO Today has an interesting article by Steve Lohr that shares how Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at the Sloan School of Management, views the current state of affairs:
My thinking on productivity has completely changed,” said [Erik Brynjolfsson], who is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
By tracking e-mail traffic, instant messages and other digital communications — stripped of personally identifiable information — he and other researchers are beginning to study the flow of work and ideas through the social networks inside companies — minute by minute, bit by bit.
“We’re really on the cusp of being able to understand what goes on inside corporations in a much more scientific way than ever before,” he said. “It’s similar to the way that the microscope opened up biology in the 17th century, so that you could see blood cells. Now, we can start to see bits of information as they flow through the organism of the corporation.”
In other words, corporate brains now have the power to keep track of your productivity in minute detail. Of course, researchers are interested in the science, but corporations are interested in maximizing your productivity. Good, bad, scary? Definitely good for corporate efficiency, maybe bad for some employees, and certainly a test of privacy policies.
