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FOLLOWING UP ON MY PREVIOUS POST on Jed Christiansen's comments of our prediction market paper: I've also heard that other companies would find it impossible to analyze the interaction between their market and the organization. Why? Lack of data. Our analysis benefited from a wealth of internal data (including GPS coordinates of offices) that other companies don't store.
You may be surprised at how much data average companies really have. For example, Google had social network surveys; many companies do not. However, many standard corporate applications (such as email, calendars, telephones and code reviews) contain implicit social networks that can be used in place of data gathered from surveys.
Or, consider this: I recently met with people from Google's real estate management group. Turns out, they have records of the floorplans of Google's offices in electronic format. Not only can someone use these records to find the distance between offices (without GPS coordinates) -- you can also find the total area and perimeter of each office, which desks are open (cube-style) vs. enclosed, the walking distances between offices and more.
Surprised and impressed, I asked if it was typical for companies to have all of this information. The response was: "Any Fortune 1000 company would have this data about their offices." Everyone in the room said his previous employer had the same data -- typically managed through computer-aided facility management systems such as Archibus or Infor.
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed on this site are the author's and not necessarily his employer's.
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