Many police departments now use miniaturized video cameras and microphones to record all interactions between police and civilians. The cameras are generally unnoticeable to the untrained eye and are placed on a pair of glasses or on a police cap. A central server automatically uploads all videos, which become part of a reservoir of digital evidence. This allows the department to keep track of any police misconduct and also to avoid any bogus complaints.

Motorola is marketing an arm band that allows a company to keep track of how quickly an employee performs his or her job. It looks like something between a Game Boy and a Garmin GPS device. For example, Tesco, a British grocery store chain, uses the arm bands to see how fast employees unload and set goods in a warehouse, assigning a grade to each. It can even maintain a record of when and how often employees take a bathroom break. Employees who do not meet specific productivity score targets (those with a grade of “C” or below) may be terminated. According to Tesco, this has allowed the company to operate stores with 20 percent fewer employees.

Intel has developed a device to continuously monitor employee productivity. For instance, Zynga (a rapidly growing Internet-startup provider of video games) uses the system to relentlessly aggregate performance data, ranging from the cafeteria staff to the top management team. CEO Mark Pincus purportedly devours all the reports, using multiple spreadsheets and many performance indicators to carefully keep track of the progress of Zynga’s roughly 3,000 employees.

Retailers have a new tool to turn up the heat on their salespeople: computer programs that dictate which employees should work, when, and for how long. Ann Taylor Stores Corp. has installed such a system. When saleswoman Nyla Houser types her code number into a cash register at the store, it displays her “performance metrics”: average sales per hour, units sold, and dollars per transaction. The system schedules the most productive sellers to work the busiest hours.

Samer Takriti, a Syrian-born mathematician, heads up a team that is piecing together mathematical models of 50,000 of IBM’s tech consultants. The idea is to inventory all of their skills and then calculate, mathematically, how best to deploy them. Takriti and his colleagues seek to turn IBM’s workers into numbers that track what they do.

To put together this system, Takriti requires mountains of facts about each employee. While this sounds Orwellian, he has unleashed some 40 PhDs, from data miners and statisticians to anthropologists, to comb through workers’ data. Sifting through resumes and project records, the team can assemble a profile of each worker’s skills and experience. Online calendars show how employees use their time and with whom they meet. By tracking the use of cell phones and handheld computers, Takriti’s researchers may be able to map workers’ movements. Call records and e-mails define the social networks of each consultant. Whom do they copy on their e-mails? Do they send blind copies to certain people?

Amanda Treeline is a manager at an executive recruitment firm that specializes in sales talent, and she gets hundreds of resumes a week. The firm has developed a numerical profile to screen candidates. She claims that their system allows them to screen large databases to identify a small set of candidates on specific criteria that hiring managers are interested in. On average, they are able to decrease the number of candidates from over 1,000 potential hires to just 20 qualified candidates, and then the line managers are sent a detailed profile of each of these candidates including sales stats, resume, LinkedIn profile, picture, and video resume.