peter (6/10/2009)
GSquared,I don't think the people that object to software selecting people are against tools and progress. That out of the way, you bring your experience with a system you made to the table. By doing this you seem to think that your sales support software and its desired outcome are a good analogy of what Google does with its employees. Consequently you expect a similar outcome in Google's case.
There are however some important differences IMHO.
The relation "Customer - Salesperson/Company" is quite different from "Employee - Manager/Employer".
It is actually the reverse of what your experience is. The Company is in fact the customer of the employee that provides its services to the company! The sales person does not even fit the analogy, nor does the manager.
The cost/benefit/responsibility structure of the tool users in this case are very different. Where the sales person cannot go wrong by having to many customers (by paying a little too much attention), the manager has to deal with competing forces and do as much as possible with as few people as he can and on a strict budget. This puts pressure on him to use the tool in ways it is not intended to be used.
On top of it the relation sales person customer is much less personal as the relationship employee and employer (what a misnomer, that cloud so many minds).
In short your tool doesn't run into the same ethic problems as Google's. The effect of a sales tool that motivates more action on the part of the sales persons is always a positive for the company and its customers. It is not so in manager hands as the manager has many suppliers "under his command" and conflicting targets.
I have no doubts that the tool could be used unethically or in ways other than what's intended. On the other hand, I think that's a spurious argument when it comes to whether the tool should be used or not in the first place.
The question is not does it have the possibility of being misused. The question is, is it more prone to misuse than human memory and attention, or not?
Let's say a manager has six people that directly answer to him, and he misremembers that Joe is getting $60k/year and thinks that Bob is the on earning that much, when Bob is actually getting $70k/year. Now, it turns out that the fair-market-value of the job that Joe and Bob are doing is $65k/year. Which one is more likely to quit and seek greener pastures? The one getting less than normal pay or the one getting more? The manager realizes that one of his employees is getting less than FMV and starts looking into whether or not he needs to give Bob a raise. He finds out Bob is getting more than FMV, but that Bob actually deserves that because of various factors, and considers the situation handled. He thinks he misremembered Bob's pay. Then Joe suddenly quits because he's been job hunting and got something that pays $62/year.
The manager, suffering from a relatively normal human lapse of memory, just lost a potentially valuable employee. If he'd received an automated e-mail from a computer system that tracks this kind of thing, he'd have checked out Joe, found that he was earning less than he's worth (in this situation), and recommended a raise.
Now, one attitude being expressed here is that the manager messed up when he mixed up Joe and Bob, and he should now probably be fired and replaced. I use Outlook to track meetings, thus, I sympathize with the manager on a simple mistake like that. If he does it routinely, that's another thing, but if it's the usual human occassional error, I'll be happy to help him develop/aquire tools that help overcome that.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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