Read the book 'Making Things Talk' - think about the potential of measuring things in the analog world, temperature, weight, flow, force, sound, etc, and correlating these things with enterprise data.
Maybe you can start off by measuring things like heartrate, blood glucose levels, physical mobility, dietary intake, etc. For instance, if someone is stressed all day, this probably is going to correlate with productivity.
I started down this path, looking at things like: - number of people who Emailed an individual asking about a specific topic -percent of time spent in Outlook vs Visual Studio vs WoW (RescueTime-esque stuff) - number of IMs initiated from someone at least one level higher than them
But at the end of the day, can that really tell you quantitatively that Bob is better than Suzie? Even the example above about being stressed - I know people who are super chill and excel at their job, and others who are stressed all the time and also excel (and vice versa).
Maybe the answer is to pull in hundreds of these variables and run a neural net against actual performance rankings to see if any statistically significant correlations pop out?
I think you are right about pulling in hundreds of these variables to correlate with both intuitive and quantitative tests that we have to define 'productive' employees. Then you can send an electric shock whenever someone's theta waves get too low or something..
Seriously though, our first level of productivity is dictated by things biological, and if you can create models to paint a strong enough picture of a productive worker then it gives you a feedback loop. And don't forget, not everyone is a knowledge worker like us, people still drive trucks for a living, pick fruit, do construction, etc. That is a huge market.
It's probably been done. If anyone knows of something like this, please let me know.
I would also like to mention an anecdote; a teacher once told me a student of his bet he'd get positive results from taking LSD (or something, it might have been extasy) on the day of the PSU, the once-a-year standardized test that determines admission to Chilean colleges. He flunked.
I've daydreamed about something similar. Not sure whether it would be better or worse, but my implementation would limit the amount each person can give, per month. I also struggled with the idea of making it a token economy. Thoughts?
Also, I think d0mine's right that kinder people who are easy to work with but not necessarily great performers will get lots of points.
What it overemphasizes is jobs that benefit multiple people in visible ways. At my last job, I wrote code used by the internal QA team of 50 people that made their lives easier. I imagine that would earn a lot of karma. On the other hand, when I worked on a bug for an external customer, only my manager would care.
Fail.
