The Measurement and Valuation of Human Infrastructure: An Introduction to the ‘New Way to Know’

8/26/2009 By Janice Presser, Ph.D.

During the past century, a series of evolutionary steps have shifted the view of people in the workplace from ‘personnel’ to ‘human resources’ to ‘human capital.’ Each stage of evolution has brought significant benefits to working people. And yet, all these stages of development have shared a fundamental assumption that workers are discrete units to be evaluated on an individual basis by the economic and/or psychological measures of the day. Similarly, an individual’s value to an organization has been inferred by simply collating individually derived, non-predictive metrics such as education level, aptitude and IQ. It is ironic that the detailed measurement of individual characteristics has been accepted for so long as a predictor of performance when it makes much better sense to study and measure characteristics that predict how people are likely to work together to bring either synergy and support—or problems and obstacles—to organizational activity. The time has come to move beyond the view of people as a pool of generic resources or capital. In the complex and shifting environment of global competition in a high-tech, knowledge-driven world, people have truly become the ‘human infrastructure’ of every organization. Prior to introducing the concept of human infrastructure, which provides the reasoning behind this final evolutionary step, as well as the metrics that validate the need for the semantic shift, we will posit two interrelated ideas to guide the reader through our discussion of the evolutionary process. First: Using the appropriate term to describe the function is important. More than just an exercise in semiotics, appropriate description sets up the expectations of the audience one wishes to influence. Second: It is critical that the introduction of a descriptive term be accompanied by a solid, theoretically based,