Irving Wladawsky-Berger

The Business Value of Social Networks

The January 30 issue of The Economist included a special report on social networking.  Overall, the special report concludes: “that social networks are more robust than their critics think, though not every site will prosper, and that social-networking technologies are creating considerable benefits for the businesses that embrace them, whatever their size.”

But, while “fans claim that new social-networking offerings now being developed for the corporate world will create huge benefits for businesses,”  many companies remain skeptical.  “There is plenty of doubt about the benefits of online social networking in the office.  A survey of 1,400 chief information officers conducted last year by Robert Half Technology, a recruitment firm, found that only one-tenth of them gave employees full access to such networks during the day, and that many were blocking Facebook and Twitter altogether.”

Other studies have reached similar conclusions, such as this recent State of Workforce Technology Adoption conducted by Forrester Research.  It found that while most enterprises agree that collaboration tools are important for members of a team, - especially if that team is distributed across many locations, - such tools are not widely adopted.  e-mail, with 87% adoption, is the default collaboration tool for most people in business.

This is a particular problem for younger workers, who are widely using social media technologies outside of work.  The Forrester study found that sixty percent of workers under thirty use social networking at home, but less than one quarter of them - 13% -  also use such technologies at work.

Why are so many companies reluctant to embrace social networking?  One of the articles in The Economist special report focused on this question - Yammering away at the office: a distraction or a bonus?  “An astonishing amount of time is being wasted on investigating the amount of time being wasted on social networks,” it provocatively starts out saying, and then adds:  “Studies regularly claim that the use of Twitter, Facebook and other such services poses a threat to corporate wealth.”

Extreme Scale Computing

Supercomputing has been a major part of my education and career, from the late 1960s when I was doing atomic and molecular calculations as a physics doctorate student at the University of Chicago, to the early 1990s when I was general manager of IBM's SP family of parallel supercomputers.

The performance advances of supercomputers in these past decades have been remarkable.  The machines I used as a student in the 1960s probably had a peak performance of a few million calculations per second or megaflops.  Gigaflops (billions) peak speeds were achieved in 1985, teraflops (trillions) in 1997, and petaflops (a 1 followed by fifteen zeros) in 2008. 

The supercomputing community is now aiming for exascale computing, - 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second.  The pursuit of exascale-class systems was a hot topic at the recent SC09 supercomputing conference. 

In the quest for the fastest machines, supercomputers have always been at the leading edge of advances in IT, identifying the key barriers to overcome and experimenting with technologies and architectures that generally then appear in more commercial products a few years later.

Technology, Leadership and Innovation in the Service Economy

At the end of January I gave a half-day seminar at MIT on Technology, Leadership and Innovation in the Service Economy.  I offered the seminar as part of MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP), a four week informal learning interlude between the fall and spring semesters that offers a variety of experimental short courses and seminars.

For a while now, I have been thinking about how technology and innovation can best be applied to services.  It is a subject I come back to repeatedly in this blog.  My interest started several years ago, when we launched a number of efforts in IBM to help create a research and academic discipline around services.  We coined the term Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of this emerging discipline.  We usually refer to it as just Service Science.

A number of universities have already organized different kinds of Service Science programs, such as Services Management and Consulting at NC State University and Information and Service Design at UC Berkeley.  Several additional schools around the world are in the process of launching such programs.

My interest in technology-based services innovation was heightened last summer when I read an excellent report, Hidden Wealth: the contribution of science to service innovation, based upon a study sponsored by the UK Royal Society.  I found Hidden Wealth to be one of the most comprehensive studies anywhere on the promise of technology and innovation to services, and its potential impact to 21st century economies. 

Disruptive Innovations and Organizational Change

Over the last few years I have given a number of seminars on Technology-based Business Transformation.  In these seminars, I examine how companies can leverage disruptive innovations to go after new business opportunities or to significantly transform themselves.  Often, the transformations are needed because the business is in crisis, such as happened to IBM in the early 1990s or is the case with a number of media companies today. 

The seminars are generally organized into three section.  The first two focus on strategy formulation and execution respectively.  The last section deals with the organizational and cultural issues involved in going through such a major transformation.

Many companies fail to adequately embrace a disruptive innovation not because they did not develop the right strategy, but because the strategy was essentially rejected by the organization, and was thus doomed to fail from its very beginning.  The culture of the institution was not able to stretch enough to be able to implement the needed changes.  This happens even when the very survival of the organization is at stake.  It is as if a kind of institutional depression has set in.  

We sometimes forget that disruptive innovations are indeed disruptive, not only in the marketplace but also for individuals and organizations.  Much as we often talk about embracing change as a positive experience, change is in fact very difficult, even painful for many people.  You are asking them to move into unknown, perhaps even unchartered territory.  What will be the impact on their jobs?  Do they have the required skills for whatever is ahead?  How well will they personally do in the new environment?