News Feature

Reality Bytes: Fed Up with Feedback

By Alison Bass

October 15, 2002 — CIO — Americans have long been suspicious of the idea of a national ID card, particularly one linked to a centralized database kept by the federal government. Even after Sept. 11, a majority of Americans (according to various polls) oppose Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s concept of a national ID card embedded with biometrics. We-the-people seem to get the Big Brother ramifications of technologies that permit the instantaneous collection and analysis of reams of data. But there’s another side to this stuff that gets less attention but is just as insidious.

Take, for example, a new software release that purports to collect and collate data on an employee’s performance and deliver it to that person on a "continuous and timely" basis. This software, called individual performance improvement (IPI), has been developed by the folks at Richmond Hill, Ontario-based Changepoint.

According to a Changepoint press release, IPI software takes feedback from the employee’s peers or customers and combines it with existing data from the RoboBoss system for a "holistic picture." What’s so bad about that, you ask? After all, an increasing number of employers collect feedback from people at all levels of an organization for what is known as a 360-degree review of an employee’s performance. This type of evaluation is widely considered state of the art. But the raw data for these evaluations are not stored in some centralized database as part of the employee’s permanent record.

IPI would change all that. It would provide a permanent audit trail of all kinds of feedback, some of which you and I might view as prejudiced or trivial. The danger of such a permanent record is its power to pigeonhole people?freeze them in a snapshot of time that could rob them of any potential for future change. Keep in mind that what is now stored in an employee’s permanent file is the final review, carefully crafted by a (one hopes sensitive) manager who has pulled together the highlights of that person’s performance. IPI software would automatically add to that all the off-the-cuff commentary that anybody has ever made. People are already afraid to discuss performance (because of fears about legal liability, some employers won’t even give you a job reference once you’ve left their employ). So you can imagine how much more timid this will make corporate employees. Or dare I say, robotic?

Save the Children

This kind of permanent audit trail could pose even greater harm in other arenas. Consider a similar software app that is now being marketed as a student assessment tool for K-12. Created by Data Friendly, this software can analyze thousands of student records to help teachers and administrators better assess factors affecting student performance. For instance, such aggregate data might help a teacher understand why the dropout rate in her eighth-grade class is so high, according to Ronald Daniels, the CEO of Data Friendly in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. That kind of tool could indeed be valuable in analyzing aggregate trends in student performance. The slippery slope comes in its capacity to collect and analyze an individual student’s information (including what she eats for lunch and what she’s told her guidance counselor about problems at home) in order to assess her progress and identify her strengths and weaknesses. Too many public school students are already stereotyped as slow learners or problem children based on irresponsible teacher analyses. One can imagine the potential for injury, not to mention massive invasions of privacy, if software like this were ever to be used on a large-scale basis in our school systems to track individual students.