Jeff Moden (6/10/2009)
GSquared (6/10/2009)
BUT, in a company with thousands of employees, can top management, or even upper middle management, actually get to personally know every employee?Absolutely agreed. I didn't say they needed to get to personally know every employee. I said to talk with people in person. For situations such as that you've cited, things like departmental "town hall" meetings by upper managment (right up to the GM at Raytheon 20 years ago) and an open door policy from immediate management right to the GM will provide much more value than a computer program. I ask you, what will the computer criteria be for determining if a Jeff or a Gus are getting ready to leave a company? Proper management will sense it long before any computer even has enough data to suggest it.
Don't disagree with you about the need for human involvement in the process. I just think a system that can do things like track average national and local salaries and compare those to current salaries for employees would be a good thing. There are plenty of metrics like that that can be more easily tracked by a computer than by a person.
No computer will know that Gus' morale is out the bottom and digging a new coal mine, but it will know that he's never yet had a performance review, that his salary is below average for the area, that he has fewer projects than his work capacity, that he spends far too much time on sites like this one during working hours, and that there are job offerings in the area at equal or better pay. A manager should know some of these things as well, perhaps all of them, but if the manager is so burried in meetings that he has about 1 hour per week that's not "busy" per his schedule in Outlook/Exchange, and that hour is spent putting out fires because he's recently lost over 75% of his department in layoffs, the manager might appreciate an alert from a system that helps track these things. An incompetent manager might go, "Gus is a risk right now, let's dump him and see if we can get someone cheaper". A good manager might go, "Let's spend my one-hour-per-week with Gus next week and see if there's a problem, and what we can do about it if there is".
If you check my posts on many of Steve's editorials about new technologies, you'll see that I am fervently opposed to anything that tries to replace human judgement on human things, and that I'm in favor of things that assist or support human judgement on human things. It's the same in this case.
If Google was talking about replacing all of their junior managers with a database and data mining platform, I'd say they were insane. They're not.
Will the system be misused/abused in some cases? Of course. The question, as always, is will it have the potential to do more good than harm? Potential to do more good than harm.
- 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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