The metrics guys are going to love this ;o) Contrary to my previous posts there may be future hope for a strategic model, operating system and generally accepted principles of evaluation which have not been available until now for HR. Just kidding, but here are additional perspectives to follow up my post late last year on Nokia!

It spells out some perspective as to the future of mobility, communication and retaining staff! Two interesting tools are from tech heavyweights IBM and Google. One in reference to using technology to translate – for example; possibly connecting a project team in Dublin to other project teams in Shanghai, Berlin, Milan, Soeul, Lisbon, Tokyo and Sao Paolo without any of them speaking the other’s language!  And if that didn’t help tip your morning coffee cup …. old news but I am guessing Google have had recent opportunity to test the alogorithm they started developing last year to find out when their employees (will) leave. Magic.

At IBM, a team of nearly 100, including mathematicians and software developers, are working on a project to create an automatic translation tool, so-called machine translation that has the speed and accuracy to be used in instant-messaging between speakers of two different languages. The project, called n.Fluent, is intended to teach the computer terminology that is specific to IBM’s businesses, and, more significantly, allow the computer to learn what it has been doing wrong. To that end, the company is extracting and organizing contributions from IBM’s 400,000-member work force spread across more than 170 countries, adding a human touch to the project. Over a two-week period last month, the company issued a “worldwide translation challenge” to its employees, using a points-based system to award the biggest contributors prizes that were converted to charitable donations. About 6,000 IBM employees made improvements in 11 languages to more than two million words of text translated by n.Fluent. So far, n.Fluent is used only by IBM employees, but the intention is to create a product that can be sold to other businesses.

This highlights the differences between what is occurring at IBM and other large companies and what traditionally constitutes crowd sourcing. IBM employees are not just any “crowd”; they have expertise and a loyalty to their employer. In fact, crowd sourcing may be the wrong way of thinking of such internal corporate projects. Employee-sourcing? IBM like Nokia are leading the way “by a mile” on employee social networks.

Concerned a brain drain could hurt its long-term ability to compete, Google Inc. started tackling the problem as you might expect, with an algorithm.  Since May last year Google began work on a database that by all accounts will determine which of its employees are the most likely to leave the company, after it has seen some of its high-end staff head out the door.

The database is based on employee reviews, pay and promotion histories and a mathematical formula that the company claims can accurately determine which workers will quit ahead of others. The company says that the database has already identified workers who feel their skills are being under-used, a key complaint of workers contemplating leaving.

Former Google employees, such as designer Doug Bowman, engineer Steve Horowitz and search-engine worker Santosh Jayaram, have all left the company to work on internet start-ups. The company has even lost some of its executive team to other companies, with head of display advertising David Rosenblatt and advertising sales chief Tim Armstrong both departing.

Others have recently left in Europe, here in Budapest I know their country/regional head left not so long ago and a number of senior European execs were recently touted in the media as headed for companies like facebook and twitter ….. so the algorithm is surely now being tested!

Valerie Frederickson, a consultant in the Silicon Valley area who has worked with Google employees, told the Wall Street Journal that Google is losing employees by not implementing personable human-resources programs and training. “They need to come up with ways to keep people engaged. If Google was doing this enough, they wouldn’t be losing all these people,” she said.

Laszlo Bock (Romanian born with a Hungarian name – note to the wine conneiseur: the surname is a fantastic vineyard if you travel to Budapest), Google Vice President for People (HR), said that the algorithm helps the firm “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave”. Scary. I wonder if they’ve tested the alogorithm on Marissa? Googlers you have been forewarned by HRN Europe – do not “think” anything bad about HR!

“Google is casting a much wider net, looking at things like promotion and pay histories, performance appraisals and other kinds of HR and non-HR elements that haven’t traditionally been used in these sorts of things — it’s pretty unique,” says Klein.

Jordan Newman, a spokesman for Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, says the company is no longer commenting publicly about the algorithm.