"But unless the intention is to make decisions with this data, one might wonder what the purpose of such a system could possibly be."
Speaking as an analyst, you'd be amazed (or not) at how much analytics is done either for resume padding, because one guy thinks it's "cool", or to enable marketing or executives to chase their own tails.
Indeed, with the general phenomenon of bullshit jobs, infinite instantaneous and always changing information is a welcome smokescreen, because it always allows people to "justify doing something". With such numbers, there is always something for them to do :p
They don't really mean anything, you can't draw actionable conclusions, and no one will even read the report after the first week, but you gather the metrics anyway to satiate the Metrics God's hunger.
This has been my experience working in enterprise. There is an enormous amount of "tactically motivated analytics" going on, and not just within the realm of marketing.
Almost every metric can be abused by increasing the frequency, resolution and dimensions in which it is measured.
In terms of some real world examples:
Labour force statistics are almost always reported on an instance level by commentators/media, but its trend that's recommended/meaningful.
Net promoter scores and breakdowns are consistently done and reported too frequently on too small a base to establish a trend, and they're usually cross tabulated and spoke on far too many dimensions.
Customer opinions and employee ratings/surveys.
Generally it's just fundamental statistics: don't reason too much about the general from the specific. And as you get greater resolution and move towards real time events, your specific becomes smaller and smaller, which means that extrapolations onto the general result in greater and greater errors...
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Do you know of any good writing on the web or print that talks more about such abuses in the analytics and corporate world? Interested to learn how to spot when kooky tactics are at play in a tech/corporate setting, specially when its willful.
Speaking as an analyst, you'd be amazed (or not) at how much analytics is done either for resume padding, because one guy thinks it's "cool", or to enable marketing or executives to chase their own tails.
Indeed, with the general phenomenon of bullshit jobs, infinite instantaneous and always changing information is a welcome smokescreen, because it always allows people to "justify doing something". With such numbers, there is always something for them to do :p