Ben Waber - What People Analytics Can Tell Us About Your Business

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Summary:

Ben Weber is the President and Co-founder of Humanyze. Ben is particularly passionate about the power of behavioral data and analytics and its ability to improve organizations and how people work in general. He has been featured in Wired, CNN, and The New York Times, among other outlets, and his work was selected for Harvard Business Review's List of Breakthrough Ideas and Technology Review's Top 10 Emerging Technologies. In this episode, Ben talks about collaboration data, AI, and expertise. 

Chapters:

[0:00 -5:32] Introduction

•Welcome, Ben!

•Today’s Topic: Collaboration Data, AI, and Expertise

[5:33 -15:37] What is collaboration data and why does it matter?

•Understanding how people communication and work together

•Striving for complete data sets vs “good enough” data sets

[15:38 -29:38] Adaptive statistics (i.e., AI) and its role in data analysis

•How developments in technology have allowed us too find correlations within massive data sets

•Are we holding onto unrealistic expectations for AI?

[29:39 -39:55] How does expertise impact people analytics inside of an organization?

•Unlearning that it’s best practice to copy success

•Using hypothesis backed by data to improve an organization

[39:56 -42:47] Final Thoughts & Closing

•Professional ethics’ role in people analytics

•Thanks for listening!

Quotes:

“When companies look at things like collaboration technologies that are purpose built for very specific applications, [they] better understand the implications of that for how people work, because even if it makes a particular team’s task more efficient—if it detracts from the coordination and collaboration that has to happen across teams, it may be negative.”

“I like to call [AI] ‘adaptive statistics’ because that's what it is—these things are correlation engines, and what makes them more productive is lots of data. So why suddenly have things been able to get a lot more predictive or [why] can we [generate images] with these algorithms much better than we could in the past? It's not because the algorithms themselves are different, [it’s because] now we can literally mine every single piece of text on the internet.”

Contact:

Ben's LinkedIn
David's LinkedIn
Dwight's LinkedIn

Production by Affogato Media
Podcast Manger: Karissa Harris