There were a swarm of papers published in the late 90′s and early 2000′s surrounding a very, very strange thing: turns out that asking people to fill out a survey about a positively viewed product actually causes them to buy more of that product, buy it more quickly, and become more profitable customers. This is called, in some circles, the “Mere Measurement effect.”Just in case you want to know where I came up with the above, here’s some light bedtime reading: Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry.

There are a slew more articles on the subject, a quick perusal on Google Scholar will get you acquainted with the literature.

There’s an older observation related to this new research: “What gets measured generally gets done.” Named for the place where studies were done on production improvements in the 1920′s,  The Hawthorne Effect has now been evolved into multiple lines of research and nuance, but the point is simple:  paying attention to things improves their performance.

Shocking huh?

Although today some research points to the fact that only measuring things does not necessarily improve them, the fact remains that measurement is vital to increased performance, especially as a form of attention given to a vital area. If you consider that timing a race is the only way to determine if one has run faster, and that looking at splits or heart rates or pace are also helpful to athletes in a training situation, it is obvious that measurement is a key to improved performance.

So how does Business Intelligence and the software industry as a whole make use of this?

Simple: turns out that any software that measures something, and shows that measurement, and interim measurements, to the people performing that behavior, will cause improvement against those measures. If that software shows those results publicly, or allows them to be discussed, things get even better.

We all see this is enterprise software sales, especially on inside sales teams, where the bell gets rung for each deal, where whiteboards show bookings quarter-to-date, and indeed in the entire performance monitoring industry.

If software not only measured those results, but also caused salespeople to think through and state their intentions (commits) and focus on the growth toward their intentions (pipeline), especially if we view the changes over time, the above research  gives us a clear indication that sales performance would improve.

Oddly enough, if we stick with the sales performance theme, we find that most people use a CRM package to look at actual results (bookings) and usually pipeline. But almost all CRM packages don’t show changes in pipeline over time, or bring the key measures that matter to the fore, and track them over time.

This is echoed through most software packages: measurement is for managers – but that’s actually the place where it does the least good.

I say: Measurement for the masses!

and that’s all I’m going to say for now;-)

I’m convinced that the next wave is around taking the data that’s all around us, using machines to analyze it, and selling it back to the very people who created it in a way that gives them more value.

Recently came across the true KnowItAll‘s who are working at the U of Washington. This group also is associated with some of the best next-wave thinking around how to pull off this type of endeavor.

So a shout out to Jason Maynard from Credit Suisse (who launched their OnDemand Index, and whom I think is one of the few analysts who really do have a good feel for what’s going on out there) with whom I had the conversation around creating or finding a company that took customer data from other OnDemand vendors, anonymized, aggregated, and analyzed it, then sold it back to those very customers.

The example: you get a SaaS company that has all kinds of information around their customers’ businesses: for instance how much sales pipeline per rep x y and z companies have. They ask their customers to opt-in for this service in exchange for their data being imported into the model. 50 customers sign up, and then you can tell all 50 how their pipeline per rep is compared to their peers.

There would be objections around privacy, but I think the KnowItAll’s have a solution for that, dating back to 2001!

What would make this even more interesting is to produce a taxonomy, or to allow the community to produce a taxonomy via open source methods, in order to take it further, and then to go across other companies.

So – if you’re out there reading this and know of a company that does this or wants to, drop me a line because I want to join that company!!!

IBM, Novell, and Parity Communications are talking about blind encryption to allow internet surfers to anonymously visit, and indeed transact with sites.

Of course, their project is the right thing to do, in terms of privacy, security, and in keeping the status quo.

Now – the “status quo” statement above should make you think. Isn’t that changing the “status quo?”

Before the digital tech era, the “web” era (so let’s say 10 years ago for the average person) people couldn’t effectively track all of your purchases, what you looked at, where you went and what you were interested in, and then target you with advertisements.

Anonymity was the status quo.

Now – let’s consider why this effort is doomed in terms of commercial success. Even a nascent system, such as e-commerce over the web, has built up powerful interests and requires a somewhat stable transactional model. Today we know the game: You come to my site, I track you and entice you to disclose, I advertise to you, and then I sell you something (eventually).

If I can’t track you, and can’t profile you, and don’t know what you bought, and actually am thwarted from developing ideas about you, then my model is in trouble.

No web merchants are going to participate in transactions with this type of system voluntarily, and most will oppose it if necessary.

So success for this effort demands massive demand for incremental privacy from people like you and me, which history has shown virtually never happens — not for privacy or any other perceived incremental advancement.

There are a bunch of caveats, and there are ways that this could work, and I would love for that to happen.

But I’m not waiting around.