for More Bad Ideas.
One of the most recognized brands in the world is that of IBM, International Business Machines,  the manufacturer of "mainframe computers" that have stored and sorted the data (information about us!) that the largest corporations in the world use to conduct there businesses.
As the Internet has grown (it is said that 70 percent of Americans are now online regularly) so has IBM's server and networking business, connecting to the teleco's "dumb pipes" that deliver the packets of 1's and 0's hither and yon on the World Wide Web. (That's where the www before the dot comes from.)
IBM is much more than a Big Iron supplier, it has a business operations consulting business that advises business on how to measure it's inputs, through puts and outputs (<strong><cite>Metrics </cite></strong> and makes managing people and processes by a mathematically modeled decision process.
The Numerati by Stephen Baker details how an IBM group goes about "Building mathematical models of it's employees. IBM aims to improve productivity and automate management ." www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0618784608/ref=nosim/your_httpgetoveblo-20_id
As we are all aware, your employer's IT department can generate a report detailing every web site that you have clicked on your desktop. IBM goes even further, charting employees phone calls, time spent in meetings and relationships with other IBM employees. The "Operations Process Group" covered in The Numerati studies it's targets for several months before collating and analyzing all the data it has collected.
The management group's analysis of cellphone, Blackberry  and e-mail  traffic can identify informal networks within the competing departments that consume so much of a companies time as they compete for resources.
There is no Privacy in the Workplace
At one time in America there was a trust established between employer and employee: The employee would come to work and do the best job they could while looking out for the companies interest by not wasting materials or time while the company would reciprocate by providing a continuous flow of work and materials. As the company grew and expanded the employees would move-up the management chart, perhaps even becoming the Chief Executive Officer.
This Social Contract has now been torn-up and discarded, replaced by the system we work under now.
Now that IBM has quantified all that can be known about it's employees it is preparing to export this data mining program to other companies. There will be a high price attached to this so only the largest corporations will adopt this, but business software developers will package similar productivity programs to sell to smaller companies.     
The original Bad Ideas article:
www.communati.com/steve-lee/bad-ideas
As the Presidential Election nears we have been thinking about the endless political process;
www.communati.com/steve-lee/think-democracy
 30 Reads September 7/ 177 Reads October 22
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