At the MIT Media Labs, the Human Design research group is working on "reality mining" projects that use commonplace wearable technology to identify a company's de facto organization chart (as opposed to the theoretical and often-ignored one on the wall). The group is using two approaches: The first provides an Expert and Collaborator Locator, which uses speech recognition technology to generate profiles of individuals based on the words they use in conversations; the second offers Collaboration Tools, which makes it possible to query a database of employee profiles of interests, skills, or even recently used vocabulary, in order to find people who might work well together. The researchers say: "We expect that by aggregating this information, interpreting it in terms of work tasks, and modeling the dynamics of the interactions, we will be better able to understand and manage complex organizations." There are privacy issues, of course, and here the key is to make the system transparent and to allow employees to scrutinize their bosses' behavior. This could be interesting.
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:25 AM
