View source for Performance Measurement via Technology

<h2> Name: </h2>
Increasing performance measurement via technology

<h2> Description: </h2>
Data mining has had a long history as a marketing tool, and this trend continues to increase. However, another trend is emerging � that of using data to monitor and control worker performance and productivity [1]. Increasingly, data mining packages are intuitive and easy to implement, enabling organizations to lower their investment and maintenance costs in using these tools for human resources. 

<h2> Enablers: </h2>
1.	Better Visualization Technology
Over the past decade, the art of visualizing large datasets has developed in to nearly a science. This will enable organizations to track worker performance at a glance. New techniques are available for viewing statistical trends, and detecting outliers [2]. 

2.	Rise of cloud-based services 
As in the Driving Force above, cloud based services play a role in data mining for performance measurement, since they centralize and re-distribute processing power so that processing of large data sets need not occur on a user�s PC. Customer Relationship Management firms such as Salesforce.com have taken to this model for managing external relationships, and it is a matter of time before internal relationships and workflows are routinely monitored as well.

<h2> Inhibitors: </h2>
1.	Privacy concerns
Performance measurement is frequently a sensitive and contentious subject, but with the highly granular view that technology based performance measurement provides will likely raise concerns about potential abuse of the data and overall worker privacy. 
Paradigms:
�Everything activity generates numbers to monitor and control.� As the global workforce spends an increasing proportion of the workday on a computer, tablet, or mobile device, the data workers generate may be captured and used, for good or for ill. 
Impact on Education: In a highly competitive �Flat World� paradigm (described above), as governments tend towards standards based measurement in education, they may consider such monitoring of students in classrooms as a way to keep students focused and measure where they stand.

<h2> Experts: </h2>
1.	MIT Center for Digital Business. http://ebusiness.mit.edu/
2.	Association for Computing Machinery. http://www.acm.org/

<h2> Timing: </h2>
The trends of online collaboration are well underway � and may be expected to increase as the workplace becomes more connected and data mining tools become cheaper and easier to use.

<h2> Web Resources: </h2>
1.	A Tour through the Visualization Zoo. Association for Computing Machinery. 13 May 2010. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1805128 <br>
2.	Understanding Productivity in the Information Age. MIT Sloan News Room http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/2007-brynjolfsson.php