The Business Week article by Stephen Baker titled “Managing by The Numbers†is a must read.
The article describes how IBM, the world leader in outsourcing services with almost 400,000 employees worldwide, is introducing mathematical models to help assemble the teams best suited for a job, manage employees’ time, etc.
A team of scientists, headed by Tamer Takriti is in charge of collecting as much data as legally possible, and extracting from this huge amount of information the patterns that will help increase productivity.
So what type of information is Takriti’s team using?
It is quite simple: almost everything. It includes employee resumes, project records, phone call backlogs (including cell phones), emails (recipients, cc’ed people, bcc’ed ones), etc.
Takriti explains that the system should eventually allow a project manager to sit at a computer and rapidly assemble the best-suited team of engineers to start a call center in Manila for instance.
My first reaction was to think of Big Brother, but then I gave it second thoughts.
Since the dawn of humanity, and in small communities around the world, everybody would know about everything on any other member of the same community.
It has been like that for centuries, always with some excess, but globally human beings have been able to live with this situation, and enjoy relative freedom. The emergence of the Internet just takes this concept of community to a global level, where everybody will soon have access to virtually any information on anybody, and I do not see why this other globalization would yield to a society similar to the one described by George Orwell in 1984.
I find more interesting the fact that IBM has reached a size where they cannot even rapidly assemble a team of 5 developers to start a call center in Manila!
This seems to prove my point that a global world calls for companies that are global, yet not monolithic anymore. I would be a company looking to outsource some IT functions, I would rather trust today a “federation†of smaller size outsourcing companies than IBM, Accenture or HP to deliver high-quality flexible applications.
IBM and the likes look to me like giant dinosaurs. Granted, they are the biggest, but will they be able to adapt to what’s coming? If they do not manage to get rid of their their rigid monolithic structure, their fate is sealed, even if it might take years before they effectively disappear.
