Supporting decision making
For a week or so now, I have been annoying my co-workers with constant mentions of Linkedin’s new company page feature. While our company page is fairly sparse, the company pages of more established agencies are quite revealing. Numbers like most common job titles, gender split and median age, along with lists of who’s been recently hired and promoted are fascinating pictures of where a company is headed and what’s important to them at the moment.
In thinking about why I am so intrigued with this I have realised that there are several different reasons.
1. The aggregation of individual employee’s data reveals completely new information and insight that didn’t exist at the employee level. This is the same thing that interested me about Douglas Hofstadters book I am Strange Loop. Moving up levels of abstraction reveals different patterns and opens up new meaning and understanding. I think this is an incredibly powerful phenomenon that smart companies and smart marketers will begin to exploit much more as all types of data become increasingly available.
2. The UX has been thought through and (IMO) it is very well designed. The layout does exactly what it is supposed to do – open up new understanding and insight by allowing me to connect the different pieces of data to form a cohesive story. It is why I think we are so intrigued by sites like Information Aesthetics who present new ways of seeing the new types of data around us.
3. I am inspired to act and change my behaviour based upon these data. The company view operates like a dashboard in a very classic sense. I have written before about how important numbers are in the decision-making process. This really starts to solidify my belief in this area. The presentation of numbers in a logical, ordered and revealing way can create behaviour change. We know this intuitively from looking at our bank balances an spreadsheets but we haven’t yet brought this into how we create marketing for our clients.