Page 146 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

Autonomy or not Autonomy? that Is the Question � 125

job into particular tasks and ever-minute chunks. They are also do-
ing the same in capturing each worker’s set of skills and knowledge.
The analysis is becoming so discreet, and the software programs so
powerful, that huge jobs can be divided into many tiny steps, which
can then be linked to a workforce’s set of skills and knowledge such
that thousands of tasks can be divided between thousands of workers.
Stephen Baker’s fascinating book, The Numerati, describes the
sophisticated modeling that companies are now conducting to un-
derstand employees. They start by breaking our behaviors into tiny
2
pieces, and then they use software to “mix and match us in a frac-
tion of a second, with a million, or 100 million, others.” According
to Baker, these organizations will be able to figure out the financial
return for each skill and job category, and to compare productivity in
more and more detail. The goal is to construct mathematical models
that one day might track such personal characteristics as a person’s
food choices, friends or enemies, and even allergies—for tens of thou-
sands of a company’s workers. The task is to “depict flesh-and-blood
humans as math.” This work will eventually allow companies to know
at a very fine level what skills and knowledge each employee possesses,
to break job tasks into very finite steps that can be assigned to different
employees possessing those skills, and to do that not in time chunks
of days or hours, but eventually in minutes. “This virtual assembly
line,” Baker says, “sounds menacing. The surveillance has more than
a whiff of Big Brother. For those of us who aren’t $1,000-per-hour
consultants, life bound to a mathematical model is sounding like ab-
ject data serfdom.” Or, perhaps like good old-fashioned exploitation
of workers.
The counterargument, of course, is that these tools will improve
workers’ productivity, document their value, improve their market-
ability in a more competitive talent market, and make organizations
more successful. Those who cannot, or will not, perform will get left
behind. Those who excel will be richly rewarded.
If you tie research about human beings into work technology, you
get a pretty unbeatable combination for improving mobile workforce
productivity.