Why your boss wants to read your mail

I'd love to know if anyone has thoughts about how text analytics might be used to help firms concerned about potential discrimination by or against employees, or about employee biases.

Agree with the premise here — “Big Data” is overhyped in HR as much as anywhere. Although one can envision a future in which certain use cases can justify the techniques and tools of Big Data. For example, mining employee-generated text content like the IBM internal social media platform referenced to passively understand engagement and sentiment; analyzing physical location or tone/voice interactions to optimize collaboration spaces; or reviewing activity on company networks and HR portals to predict turnover risk and identify opportunities to improve self-service HR capabilities. With the right ethical framework, these could be at least borderline “Big” topics to tackle. Also, the author gives a good reminder that many of the problems in workforce analytics have a rich history of academic and IO research. We need as practitioners to figure out how to embrace this knowledge!

Responsible AI assumes attention to moral principles and values, to ensure that fundamental human ethics are not compromised. Transparency by the dominant companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft are lacking as witnessed by their competition with one another. All players must validate their assumed responsible AI by full disclosure about intent, act, unintended consequences and outcomes of AI.