alphaWorks

There have been several stories here about alphaWorks. Today is a special day as IBM celebrates the tenth anniversary of the program. It was an honor for me to be part of the event in San Francisco. I made some remarks today about why and how alphaWorks was created but I decided to go further here and republish part of a chapter of my book, Net Attitude, where I gave some background on what alphaWorks is all about. It was part of a bigger subject called "Organizing to get things done". Today we might call it collaborative innovation.

From Net Attitude (Perseus Publishing), November 2001

The most important ingredients to accomplishing great things as an e-business are to find, attract, recruit, hire, motivate, and retain really great people. Every year the crop of students gets better so you have to continually raise the bar -- look at every movement of staff and ask yourself if you are improving your hand.   Everyone has to not only bring something to the table but bring unique value to the overall equation.
When things are working right the whole organization breeds and feeds on itself.
If the caliber of your team is high, there's a much greater likelihood of being able to attract additional high caliber people. Once you have them it is critical to nurture and support Net Attitude and to have creative programs to take advantage of their skills.

Every CEO I spoke to during the 1990'2 wanted to know how to make e-business web projects go faster. Every CIO I have met worries about e-business web projects going too fast. The CIO has spent decades getting information technology under control and making it reliable. Fast moving projects are sometimes in conflict with that goal. The solution to the dilemma is multifaceted but one key element is to have a "Skunk Works" where rapid prototyping is the modus operandi.

The Skunk Works (continued)

Conferences , IBM , Internet Technology September 25, 2006 04:14 PM

Conference Time

Thursday was Venture Capital day at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Monday will be the tenth anniversary celebration of IBM's alphaWorks program in San Francisco, and Tuesday will be the DEMO Conference in San Diego.

The IBM Venture Capital Group facilitates relationships between the company's vast research and development, product, and marketing resources venture capital firms and their portfolio companies. Many are recent start-up companies that build their business and technology solutions on IBM's industry solutions platform and then use the IBM marketing resources to get the word out and to act as a distribution channel. It is a symbiotic relationship that works well for all parties. Yesterday's conference was attended by dozens of "VC" firms, more than fifty of their portfolio companies, and a dozen or so industry thought leaders. It was a very positive day of interaction with numerous IBM executives focused on vertical industry segments including banking, retail, media & entertainment, telecommunications, government, and healthcare. I attended three of the sessions but the most interesting was healthcare.

The biggest trend that the IBM healthcare experts talked about is an understanding of disease at the molecular level and development of targeted drugs based on genomic insight. This will lead to individual diagnosis and treatment based upon medical history and genetic predispositions, as opposed the anecdotal approach used today. This new level of understanding will also enable "pre-emptive medicine" -- don't wait until you get sick to seek treatment. Genetically we are all 99% the same but the small differences are what cause health problems. The innovation in patient-centric healthcare is going to happen much more quickly than people think. Why?

There is a convergence of four disruptive changes underway...

1. Rapid evolution in technology. Computers keep getting smaller and faster. Nanotechnology is emerging rapidly.

2. Pressure on existing business models. Many hospitals are losing money, insurers are trying to put on the brakes, consumers are not happy with the services they get, waste and duplication are rampant, and medical errors are causing deaths.

3. Social pressures. People are beginning to realize that medical data about them is their data, not the doctor's or hospital's. Hundreds of millions of people more than sixty years old have high expectations for their health and are demanding treatment for things that once would be considered incurable.

4. Political pressures. Politicians are feeling the heat and want to see progress. They want more people to get affordable or subsidized care and they want to protect privacy.

Any one of these four factors would be interesting and create pressure for change. The convergence of all four are creating a firestorm of activity. Stay tuned. (See other patrickWeb healthcare stories).

Conferences , Healthcare September 24, 2006 03:03 PM

IBM Happenings: August 2006

I am a bit late in posting the August "IBM Happenings". The month of August is slow in some parts of the world and at some companies but at IBM it was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I am particularly excited about IBM's growing leadership in the healthcare area. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

IBM September 20, 2006 05:02 PM

Paper Paper Everywhere

Somehow I managed to pull a muscle in my leg. Most likely it was launching back into an aggressive set of exercises after having been away on a trip in Eastern Europe. The doctor thought it would be prudent to get an x-ray of my hip and so there I stood at the window at the radiology lab being asked to fill out a form with a lot of information they already had. I knew better but could not resist asking why it was necessary. "We need the information". I said they already had it. The receptionist said they could look it up but only if I had been there in the last thirty days. I resisted the temptation to explain that the cost of storage had plummeted in the last decade and was close to zero for the data I would be putting on paper for the hundredth time. It certainly isn't the fault of the receptionist or the x-ray technician or even the radiologist who later read the results. The problem is the "system" and the system is owned by the management of the healthcare providers and the insurers. The hundreds of billions of dollars being spent could be reduced substantially if the management could move faster to implement basic information technology such as is used in retail, manufacturing, and by various arms of government (like e-file at the IRS). All of us should be pushing for this. The result will be lower costs, higher quality of care, and fewer medical errors.

On a more positive note, great progress is being made in the use of information technology in the clinical area. One of the important approaches to understand the underlying mechanisms of cancer has been to analyze cancer tissue microarrays (TMAs). The analysis can result in improved treatment and therapy planning for cancer patients. The problem is that it takes a lot of computer power to do the analysis. The World Community Grid is now changing the amount of computing power available.

Our laptops and desktops are idle most of the time. Even when we are "using" them, the percentage of their horsepower actually being used is small. That is the simple concept behind the World Community Grid. More than 200,000 people have "donated" 400,000 PC's to the grid. When any of the PC's are not busy, a software "agent" kicks in and delivers the unused capacity to the grid. The combined computing power of the PC's in the grid can do as much TMA analysis as a traditional computer would do in 130 years!

"Help Defeat Cancer" is one of three projects using the World Community Grid. The Human Proteome Folding project is analyzing the structures of human proteins and pathogen proteins. FightAIDS@Home is a project focused on using computation methods to identify candidate drugs that have the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV protease.

Anyone can donate idle and unused time from their personal computers by downloading World Community Grid’s free software and registering at the WCG website. No forms required. I have been participating in the grid since November 2004 with several of my PC's and have found it to be easy, safe and secure. It is also a good feeling to know that your spare cycles are going toward something that can improve humankind.

Healthcare September 15, 2006 02:26 PM

The Danube

Our journey through the Hapsburg Empire began shortly after we landed in Budapest, Hungary. Budapest occupies both banks of the river Danube -- Buda on the west bank and Pest on the east bank. With nearly two million people, it is the eighth largest city in the European Union. The city tour opened our eyes to some amazing cultural sights dating back nearly 1,000 years. In the afternoon we began the cruise on the Danube along with 125 people. We did not know any of them before the trip but now consider a number of them as friends.

The Danube originates in the Black Forest in Germany and flows mostly eastward for nearly 1,800 miles passing through several Central and Eastern European capitals before emptying into the Black Sea in Romania. Our first stop along the Danube was in Vienna, Austria on Day #4. Fortunately, we had been to Vienna before because the total time in this great city was less than a day. We were able to fit in a city tour, a walk through the amazing 13th-century cathedral, and attend a concert at the Hofburg Imperial Palace. The Mozart and Strauss music was superb.

From Vienna it was back on the Danube to Melk, a city of Austria (population around 5,000) which is the site of a massive baroque Benedictine monastery named Stift Melk. Everything about Melk is quite impressive but to me the library and it's collection of more than 400,000 books is the most interesting. Seventeen monks still live and work at Stift Melk and operate a school for 900 children in the area. (Galen Frysinger took much better pictures than I could have).

Day 6 brought us to Passau, Germany and the end of the cruise. The three-hour bus trip made a lunch stop at Cesky Krumlov, the best-preserved medieval city in the Czech Republic. The city is built around a 13th-century castle overlooking the Vltava River. It would have been easy to spend a full day there. The motor-trip that afternoon brought us to the great city of Prague. I had last been to Prague in 1994 for a meeting of the Internet Society. (Note: I would call this the turning point where the technical community began to gain consensus that the Internet would become the predominant global network for education, healthcare, government, business and the consumer. It took another five years for the business world to completely buy in.) The buildings of Prague are restored to their Baroque and Art Noveau splendor. We toured the Jewish Quarter, home of the oldest Synagogue in Europe, and the majestic Prague Castle. The castle's vast complex of palaces, churches, halls, and towers provided the residence of Bohemian royalty 1,100 years ago.

After breakfast on Day #9 we boarded the Majestic Imperator Train for an eight-hour ride to Krakow, Poland. The thought of an eight-hour ride on a train built in 1905 was not appealing initially but turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The owner is truly a train lover -- he went from car to car meeting and greeting the passengers. He told me that after a dozen years, the private train operation has become profitable. He owns eight cars and rents the tracks and locomotive from governments where he operates. His staff provided outstanding service and the day with our new friends went quickly.

The last two days were spent in Krakow, the cultural and spiritual capital of Poland. The Cathedral of Saints Stanislaus and Waclaw, dating from the 14th century, is a sanctuary of national history. All of Poland's kings were crowned there and lie in the crypt below the church (a total of 48 people are buried in the church). The "old town" is a joy to visit -- especially the 14th-century church where a lone trumpeter sounds a haunting call every hour on the hour in commemoration of a warning of an impending attack by the Tatars. The enormous plaza is surrounded by ornate houses and towering spires.

It was a long 4,000+ miles to get home and back to board meetings and other activities. Central and Eastern Europe is an outstanding way to learn more about the history and evolution of that great part of the world. I highly recommend a visit. We plan to stay in touch with a number of new friends.

Other patrickWeb travel-related stories

Travels September 11, 2006 05:26 PM