Mathematical Modeling Used To Track and Label 83
Anti-Globalism writes to tell us that in a new book titled The Numerati, author Stephen Baker introduces us to some of the math wizardry that is used to label or track our movements through purchases, phone calls, internet usage and other habits. "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, where mathematicians are building predictive models of their own colleagues. An excerpt: '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.'"
Similar concept has been tried before (Score:5, Informative)
While scientific management has its uses (e.g. optimizing an industrial process), it is definitely not everything about management. Scientific management has received plenty of criticisms in the past when it's overused, especially when the manager pushed it to the extreme and overspecialized the roles of employees - it devastates morale and harms everyone in the long term.
So while I respect the work these guys are doing, the "to automate much of what we call management" bit sounds like an exaggeration to me. After all, a lot of management is about people and communication, and even our best AIs don't have much idea about the latter today.