Today’s the day for talking about things in two dimensions, it seems.

A co-worker and I were discussing a work situation (not here, fortunately) where things are getting heated and personal. I made the statement “this is what happens when really smart people jump in” and he corrected me: “this is what happens when really political people jump in.” We agreed there are two dimensions to organizational trouble. For illustrative purposes, I threw together a matrix, and put some rather arbitrary labels on the quadrants:

Later, I was in a discussion about how many of the people who provide huge amounts of value to the company go relatively unnoticed. They key is that perceived value to the company is a product of both your contribution and your visibility. So a work value matrix might look like:

So I figured that was that, but then had a third discussion about how SDS can best provide value (we’re doing some planning at the moment). We have lots of systems in place that crunch data and provide a quantitative view, and we have business-savvy analysts to provide a qualitative view, but there’s always room for improvement both ways – and one view holds that combining the two allows you to add qualitative business rules to your analytics to build a self-running, decision-making optimization engine. That’s either web analytics nirvana or shades of a self-aware “HAL 9000”-like infrastructure, depending on how you look at it:

Suddenly I’m thinking we need a matrix-building web site to crank these out. 🙂