As we enter 2016,  you hear story after story about the internet of things, the union of ecommerce with digital intelligence, cognitive computing and the cognitive business.  Even Warren Buffet has got into the act, investing billions in IBM in the last year or so, believing in their main focus on it.  Cognitive, of course, in this sense has to do with non- humans (businesses, organizations, machines, systems… ) understanding, reasoning and learning. A key aspect of this is what  getting access to the 80% of data that is "inside".  It might be inside files that are being moved (songs, videos or used or inside "things" that is machines, buildings, control systems etc…). But it is still the case and will be for the foreseeable future that people are the most important components of an organization, so an obvious question, is - how do you get inside them?

It's interesting to read some of the discussions by those marketing their "start-up" ideas or some academics that theorize that you can analyze an array of historical information-- education, training,  employee satisfaction data,  performance reviews etc… and get some accurate insight.  You may get some additional insight but how useable is this data?  The source data is highly variable, subjective, and frequently developed with significant  "political adjustments"….   It's not totally the case of garbage in, garbage out, but it's not too far from it.  

To me, three key questions emerge from these discussions. 

1. These capabilities are being largely developed through API's to pull data from "things" and analyze it to create understanding and then learning as new data is processed… but what can be pulled from the people in the organization - still what will inevitably be the most important entities in organizations?  After all, the key decisions are going to still be made by people - how can people effectiveness be maximized? 
2. What will happen to the roles of managers and employees as these type of systems begin to get implemented?  How will managers and line employees interact with the outputs and what limits will be imposed?
3. How can organizations deploy their people more optimally to deal with these changes including increased information, the need to deal with the outputs of many complex systems and…

We'll save 2 and 3 for another time, let's focus on the first set of issues. One of the most frequently discussed applications is to use this developing set of technologies to better optimize how expertise is deployed and developed. In organizations where knowledge work is still the primary focus, how you deploy your expertise and grow it is a core component of most organizations success. So how can this be optimally accomplished?

If you are going to determine the optimal way to allocate competencies and capabilities (which is not that much different, in many organizations, from asking how do I optimally manage my people?) inside organizations to tackle projects more effectively, build more high performing teams … To do this, you need to understand what a person's knowledge and experience  (eligibility) are and  then to complete the picture, how they would behave in relevant situations that would occur to accomplish the key goals (suitability). The causal factors that determine this are your natural tendencies, motivations, preferences and attitudes.  By using an assessment which integrates eligibility and suitability and which provides a full inventory of job types and competencies, you can provide meaningful, accurate and powerful decision support that can drastically increase your success in managing your people and in the underlying deployment of their expertise and competencies.

Cognitive systems can further be deployed to take this information and systematize its use and to further refine the predictive power of the initial eligibility and suitability profiles.