Have you ever heard of the Hawthorne Effect?

The Hawthorne Effect is a term from psychology that describes the tendency of people to act differently when they know they are being studied.  The concept was named by Henry Landsberger, who was busy in the 1950’s analyzing experiments from the 1920’s at the Hawthorne Works.

The earlier experiments were designed to measure the impact of lighting on worker productivity.  Presumably they expected to find that worker productivity increased with better lighting.  However, this was not what they found.  Instead, the original researchers observed productivity improvement in both control groups, regardless of the lighting.

The researchers were puzzled by the result.  Presumably it was not until Mr. Landsberger reviewed their work was his theory postulated.

The Hawthorne Effect has since been used to describe any short-lived productivity improvement that occurs because individuals are being watched.

So what happens if you apply this concept to MVaaS customers?  If MVaaS is deployed to several “test” sites, and these sites achieve greater performance than the other “non-test” sites in the enterprise, could you dismiss the findings and conclude that this is due to the Hawthorne Effect?