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We had peer assessment at Uni and that worked quite well, however there are two differences.

1. We were all forcd to mark 10 essays and all our essays were marked by 10 people, we did not choose them.

2. One of our 10 'markings' was assessed briefly by a tutor in private, if they thought we marked poorly our own score was downgraded.

Sounds good but I cant see the employers going for it, why would they want somewhere which makes it easier for good employees to find better jobs?

It will never work. I'm never going to slag off my old employer. If you work in the IT industry you will realise that it's a very small world indeed. Making enemies will quickly rebound on you. Anyone who does say anything remotely bad about a previous employer is clearly an amateur who won't be employable.

So, a laudable idea which will completely and utterly fail.

I once worked for a company who had "removed" and employee who was being a near liability, from what I can gather.

Later, a reference request arrived, which kind of surprised everyone. Since giving a bad reference was no longer an option, one manager supplied this beautiful reference:

"Employee X has worked to a level with which HE is entirely satisfied."

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On another note, I hate it when managerial judgement is replaced by numbers.

The process of recording who an employee is, what they do and how they perform has become more and more reliant on IT. The amount of details recorded by companies has become increasingly complex and fragmented. Mostly it seems to be lead by the IT companies, selling solutions that no one needs rather than the people who have to use the systems.

The result is bad in two ways:

1. The management and use of the IT structure takes twice as long to fill in and understand as the old paper records. These systems are extraordinarily bloated.

2. Managers no longer know how to manage staff effectively - if there is not a box for it in the form, then no decision can be made.

My father worked as a manager for a large building society in the 60s and 70s. He had a large staff that had to be managed properly. The staff records, all kept on paper, were minimal but to the point. There was no artificial scoring, but simply a set of facts from which a manager could make a proper assessment.

More importantly, a manager had no option but to get to know their staff properly, to have personal, accumulated, human experience of who they were and what they did and how they performed. This system, which used fully the processing unit called the Brain, was incredibly flexible and adaptable and could be applied to any situation.

The modern IT equivalent is completely inflexible, often relies on very arbitrary mathematical formulae and in no way actually has any real relevance to the human being involved.

Worse, it is producing a generation of managers that are incapable of making a decision based on experience, but only if the numbers add up in a certain way.

In the old days, whether an employee was rubbish or amazing, a decision about their future could be taken instantly, to the benefit of both the employee and the company.

Now, the process takes 6 months or more, and in the meantime the business stagnates and the department ceases to function properly.

The good side of IT is that it can process mass data extremely fast. The bad side is that it is providing a veritible mountain of useless data that is simply not required in any way.

Not long ago a company tried to sell me a reporting tool for my company. They produced figures of how it would improve efficiency in a multitude of ways and increase my profits.

I wasted a day and a half going through this piece of nonsense. I could find nothing that it would tell me that I did not know instinctively, and I would have to set aside about 4 to 5 hours extra a week to input the information it would need.

It might have been clever and could produce 100 times the information than my home written spreadsheet can - but it was all knowledge that, in reality, I simply don't need.

Just like this employee scoring system. I don't need it. I am perfectly capable of assessing a person without it - as a human being, I am already designed to do that!

Having done interview and selection training at work, we were told that all an employer is legally obliged to do when asked for a reference is confirm that the employee worked there and over what period, anything else opens you up to a can of worms.

"He describes WorkScore as "the first social resume" that provides a profile of what you can do with ratings from fellow workers you have invited to comment on your skills."

I believe LinkedIn is exactly the same concept, therefore, WorkScore is hardly groundbreaking.

Can someone point me in the direction of the technology angle in this?

WorkScore is just another "employment" based website, at least I'm assuming it's website idea as Maggie doesn't actually state that, and from the wording I wouldn't be surprised if it's an American only website, again Maggie appears to be leaving out vital facts. And as rgibson1503 pointed out it's not really anything new.

Personally I don't see the advantage to employers of looking at someone's "workscore" when it's been fabricated by using reviews by "selected people".

Just want to add something to my post above -

I didn't see the workscore link, my bad. Perhaps if it was in a different font, underlined, bold, or had some other embellishment it would be more obvious.

I also could possible require glasses. Lol.

I take it that this is something which can be used by employers worldwide and will therefore not have country specific "jargon"? Or will it be "Americanized"? Maggie and the WorkScore site do a good job of not making that clear.

Hmmm

About time another blog was posted - this subject seems to be boring everyone! :)

What should we all talk about? Here are a few suggestions:

• "What we don't Need?" Rory or Maggie could do a list of truly unnecessary IT functionality that is being sold as vital to our survival.

• Energy Conservation - can IT help reduce our future energy requirements, or has it just added to our woes with its very existence?

• Has the blog taken over from the badly designed, but fun and original do-it-yourself webpages (The first days of Web 2 - Geocities, WBS, Angelfire and so on)

• It there room for TWO internets? (Culturally speaking - or maybe even physically). As companies like Google and MS/Yahoo move to make their control over how we use the internet even more omnipotent, will there be a split between those that go for the Corporately controlled system, and those that play a more "underground" game? And can the second even exist in such an environment?

• The ´óÏó´«Ã½ portal is coming under increasing pressure from people such as Murdoch to reduce its presence. It is seen as a government funded extravaganza that monopolises the news sector in the UK - True or False?

• Does the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Have Your Say service need to be revisited in an attempt to offer a more balanced range of views? Possible options are an UN-recommend option or, possibly better still, simply remove the recommend system altogether - the argument being that people that hit the recommend button are probably going to post anyway.

• A long article about IT in the developing world - hasn't been visited for a while that one.


Any others?

@Gurubear - How about an expose on how much of the taxpayers money is being wasted on "failed" technology?

I see yet again the MoD is wasting money that should be better spent equipping our front line troops.

ravenmorpheus wrote:

@Gurubear - How about an expose on how much of the taxpayers money is being wasted on "failed" technology?

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Well, two examples spring to mind:

One is the story I think you are talking about where the millions spent on a communications solution has been temporarily replaced with an off the shelf solution that costs just 300,000

The other one was the infamous website for young doctors looking for work. (the one where someone had forgotten to put two lines of code to protect the page that spat out an excel doc of the entire database)

Working on the fact that is was only needed for a couple of thousand users, could have been maintained by one part time person and power wise could have been shared on any other server the NHS owned, the entire site could not have cost more than about 30,000 to build and maintain (most of that going on salary).

The cost to the tax payer? SIX MILLION.