In the Internet of Things when will humans volunteer to become the 'things'

The Internet of Things (IoT) and the advancements in M2M (machine to machine) never ceases to fascinate me. One of the prime use cases of M2M among many which has added a ton of value in several industries is real-time asset tracking and their management. I am confident the days of tediously transcribing data into data capture systems will finally be over by this decade. Almost all goods flowing through an organization (at least the valuable ones worth tracking) would have embedded sensors. They would provide real-time status and provide alerts for any imminent fault through use of intelligent predictive models.

The challenge worth thinking about is how industries where the main assets are ‘people’ and main outputs are knowledge artefacts will take advantage of this huge value-prop of M2M and IoT, that is, real time asset management. Needless to say, in the foreseeable future, knowledge based industries will be the only ones that will still employ humans, rest will probably be taking advantage of automation and employing only robots.

And such industries - like everyone else - would need to better manage their core assets which are people and their knowledge. Firms with huge number of people spread across 30-40 countries already have a difficult time matching emerging opportunities with available internal skills – a topic which I discussed in my last post how it can possibly lead to employing ‘fit-for-purpose’ mercenaries. 

In my opinion, the current situation is waiting to be disrupted. Here is a possibility which I think can happen over the next ten years. There will be emergence of digital platforms positioned for the knowledge industry that will help manage their human assets just like manufacturing does. The heart of it will be simple non-invasive software that will track down their employees' every move. The software will record the websites they visit, the forums they contribute, the groups they are affiliated to, the books they read, the internal business applications they access and so on and so forth along with time spent in each activity. And it will provide analytics on top of all this data to help categorize people into distinct expertise areas.

I know this is getting hairy. Specially after the recent Ed Snowden appearance in SXSW. The only difference I see is this. In this new scenario, it will be voluntary. People will sign up for being tracked. They will have the option of “switching off” tracking when they want to. Question is why would they do it? The main motivation would be to signal one's coordinates continuously in the huge knowledge map in a non-interventional real time manner. Services will emerge to crunch such data to come up with a single index for each individual like today's credit score! People would be eager to increase their "score" in the heavily crowded knowledge market to get recognized and improve their prospects.

I think people will be motivated to trade their privacy (selectively and optionally) when they see tangible benefits. All this will be a huge win for the industry as well as they can hire and manage their human resources far better than they can do today.