Book: The Numerati--IBM building mathematical models of its employees to automate management and

[antigop]

and improve productivity

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_36/b4098032904806.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_top+story

BusinessWeek's 2006 Cover Story, "Math Will Rock Your World," announced a new age of numbers. With the rise of new networks, the story argued, all of us were channeling the details of our lives into vast databases. Every credit-card purchase, every cell-phone call, every click on the computer mouse fed these digital troves. Those with the tools and skills to make sense of them could begin to decipher our movements, desires, diseases, and shopping habits—and predict our behavior. This promised to transform business and society. In a book expanding upon this Cover Story, The Numerati, Senior Writer Stephen Baker introduces us to the mathematical wizards who are digging through our data to decode us as patients, shoppers, voters, potential terrorists—even lovers.

One of the most promising laboratories for the Numerati is the workplace, where every keystroke, click, and e-mail can be studied. In a chapter called "The Worker," Baker travels to IBM (IBM), where mathematicians are building predictive models of their own colleagues. An excerpt:

On a late spring morning I drive up into the forests of Westchester County, N.Y., to the headquarters of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. It sits like a fortress atop a hill, a long, curved wall of glass reflecting the cotton-ball clouds floating above. I have a date there with Samer Takriti, a Syrian-born mathematician. He heads up a team that's piecing together mathematical models of 50,000 of IBM's tech consultants. The idea is to pile up inventories of all of their skills and then to calculate, mathematically, how best to deploy them. I'm here to find out how Takriti and his colleagues go about turning IBM's workers into numbers. If this works, his team plans to apply these models to other companies and to automate much of what we now call management.

[aquart]

1. I'm sure someone thinks this is a great idea.

I guess the next century will call the results "going numerical."