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