Sensible Organizations: Changing Our Businesses and Work Styles through Sensor Data

Abstract

We introduce the concept of sensor-based applications for the daily business settings of organizations and their individual workers. Wearable sensor devices were developed and deployed in a real organization, a bank, for a month in order to study the effectiveness and potential of using sensors at the organizational level. It was found that patterns of physical interaction changed dynamically while e-mail is more stable from day to day. Different patterns of behavior between people in different rooms and teams (p < 0.01), as well as correlations between communication and a worker's subjective productivity, were also identified. By analyzing a fluctuation of network parameters, i.e., "betweenness centrality," it was also found that communication patterns of people are different: some people tend to communicate with the same people in regular frequency (which is hypothesized as a typical pattern of throughput-oriented jobs) while some others drastically changed their communication day by day (which is hypothesized as a pattern of creative jobs). Based on these hypotheses, a reorganization, such that people having similar characteristics work together, was proposed and implemented.

Analysis of Informal Communication Networks – A Case Study

“…Regression analysis performed on the basis of the data and with participation of the authors provides further substantiation for this claim (Ara et al 2008). The analysis demonstrates that there is a negative relationship between proximity, as determined by geographical position (same office, same corridor) and by team membership, and the number of emails that the members exchange (r=-0.55, p<0.01).…”

“…Evaluation of the personal communications network (see also Ara et al 2008) shows that the number of different colleagues that an employee interacts with in the course of a day correlates with the response to Question 1 (r=0.19, p=0.001) whereas the total time an employee spends on personal communication correlates with the responses to Questions 1, 2 and 3 (r=0.27, 0.22 and 0.31; p=0.0008, 0.0006 and 0.0001). If one looks at the network comprising the personal network and email communications, the evaluation (Olguín Olguín and Pentland 2008) demonstrates negative correlation between the volume of communications and job satisfaction (Question 2) (r=-.48, p=0.01); this indicates that the level of satisfaction drops with the volume of messages exchanged.…”

Ego-centric Graphlets for Personality and Affective States Recognition

“…The data were collected using wearable sensors called Sociometric Badges. These sensors are equipped with accelerometers, audio, Bluetooth and Infrared to respectively capture: body movements, prosodic speech features, co-location with other individuals and face-to-face interactions [20]. SocioMetric Badges have been used in several studies to capture face-to-face communication patterns, relationships among individuals, collective behavior and performance outcomes, such as productivity and job satisfaction [21].…”

Integrating Wearable Sensor Technology into Project-management Process

“…On the other hand, when information is simple and does not require bi-directional communication, email is suitable. Ara [4] mentions the difference between face-to-face interaction and email in terms of frequency of change. Patterns of physical interaction change dynamically while email is more stable over time.…”

“…Because of this evolution of information technology, tiny computers are becoming available and collecting information about people without them noticing is possible [2]. A wearable sensing system in the workplace was conceptually proposed [3], [4] and deployed for studying the relation between communication and performance metrics of employees [5]. In our previous study, we also developed a system for sensing communication among employees, called "Business Microscope [6]," and used it in several organizations.…”