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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat happens when Big Data meets human resources?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681/They're Watching You at Work
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In 2003, thanks to Michael Lewis and his best seller Moneyball, the general manager of the Oakland As, Billy Beane, became a star. The previous year, Beane had turned his back on his scouts and had instead entrusted player-acquisition decisions to mathematical models developed by a young, Harvard-trained statistical wizard on his staff. What happened next has become baseball lore. The As, a small-market team with a paltry budget, ripped off the longest winning streak in American League history and rolled up 103 wins for the season. Only the mighty Yankees, who had spent three times as much on player salaries, won as many games. The teams success, in turn, launched a revolution. In the years that followed, team after team began to use detailed predictive models to assess players potential and monetary value, and the early adopters, by and large, gained a measurable competitive edge over their more hidebound peers.
Thats the story as most of us know it. But it is incomplete. What would seem at first glance to be nothing but a memorable tale about baseball may turn out to be the opening chapter of a much larger story about jobs. Predictive statistical analysis, harnessed to big data, appears poised to alter the way millions of people are hired and assessed.
Yes, unavoidably, big data. As a piece of business jargon, and even more so as an invocation of coming disruption, the term has quickly grown tiresome. But there is no denying the vast increase in the range and depth of information thats routinely captured about how we behave, and the new kinds of analysis that this enables. By one estimate, more than 98 percent of the worlds information is now stored digitally, and the volume of that data has quadrupled since 2007. Ordinary people at work and at home generate much of this data, by sending e-mails, browsing the Internet, using social media, working on crowd-sourced projects, and moreand in doing so they have unwittingly helped launch a grand new societal project. We are in the midst of a great infrastructure project that in some ways rivals those of the past, from Roman aqueducts to the Enlightenments Encyclopédie, write Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier in their recent book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. The project is datafication. Like those other infrastructural advances, it will bring about fundamental changes to society.
Some of the changes are well known, and already upon us. Algorithms that predict stock-price movements have transformed Wall Street. Algorithms that chomp through our Web histories have transformed marketing. Until quite recently, however, few people seemed to believe this data-driven approach might apply broadly to the labor market.
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What happens when Big Data meets human resources? (Original Post)
xchrom
Nov 2013
OP
It really tells you a lot about them, that they think this sort of thing is good.
bemildred
Nov 2013
#3
el_bryanto
(11,804 posts)1. I completely support this - I want to be the best cog that I can be! nt
xchrom
(108,903 posts)2. COG ON, BROTHER!11
bemildred
(90,061 posts)3. It really tells you a lot about them, that they think this sort of thing is good.
That they think this is what "management" is. Soon they will be talking of breeding programs.
TheJames
(120 posts)4. When "Personel" was changed to "Human Resources",
I knew we were in for it.
Resources: material to be used up, the dross to be discarded.