Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Visit to Chile

Last week I spent three days in Santiago, the capital of Chile.  Santiago is a large, modern, cosmopolitan city of around 6 million people, which is roughly 40% of the population of the country.  The key reason for my visit was to attend the World Computer Congress, which is organized by IFIP - the International Federation of Information Processing, an international umbrella organization for national societies in Information Technologies.  I gave a keynote talk on Innovation in the 21st Century:  Challenges and Opportunities, which focused on the historical context and changing nature of innovation, as well as some of the major changes taking place in technology, business and society. 

One of the pleasures of visiting another country is that you get to meet with different people and learn something about the country.  In Chile, I was able to spend time with people from universities, business and the press, as well as colleagues from IBM.  The fact that we were able to talk in Spanish, my native language, made it that much easier to communicate and understand each other.   

After my keynote, I had lunch with a number of faculty members from different universities in Chile, and joining us was a very special guest, Fernando Flores, who is a member of the Chilean Senate.  Senator Flores is a truly remarkable individual, so let me say a few words about him. 

The Importance of Human-Oriented Design to Avoid Drowning in a Sea of Complexity

I really believe that one of the most important and exciting areas of innovation is to rethink IT applications around the humans that use them not the computers that run them.  In fact, I feel that we do not have a choice -- if we want to stay one step ahead of the growing complexity of the IT systems around us.
    
When one examines the characteristics of successful IT applications – those that appeal to large numbers of people -- it is clear that they appeal to us because they are intuitive and thus easy to learn and use.  What makes applications intuitive is the fact that they are designed around objects from the real world that people are generally familiar with, and thus we can bring our real world knowledge and intuition to bear on the applications - they have a point of connection, as it were. 

The applications are then developed for the virtual world of computers, including the realistic simulations of the physical world objects on which they are based, along with added features which good designers will also make as intuitive as possible.  Since our interactions with the physical world are so visual in nature, it is not surprising that the more visual an application, the more intuitive it is likely to feel.

Short-Term versus Long-Term Thinking: the Conflict between Self-Interest and Strategic Value Creation

I meet with financial analysts from time to time to talk about initiatives in IBM and the IT industry with which I am closely involved.  Given my job as VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation, as well as my own expertise and preferences, my talks and discussions tend to focus on longer term strategies. 

I very much enjoy these meetings and feel that they are quite important.   Transparency is absolutely key for the efficient functioning of financial markets.  Investors, whether individuals or money management firms, as well as the analysts who advise them, need to have as much information as possible to help them make wise investment decisions.  I am happy to do what I can to support them and the overall process of market transparency. 

Given my interest, I have become sensitive to some problematic trends in financial markets over the last few years.  In many cases, the focus has turned from analyzing the long-term strategies that companies establish in order to thrive and survive to micro-analyzing the quarterly performance of companies, trying to predict their results to the exact penny.  I have been thinking about this, trying to understand what’s going on.      

Will America Continue to be an Innovation Leader?

In the last week of July I attended the Innovation Summit @ Stanford sponsored by AlwaysOn, an online social network for people in the technology, media and business worlds.  AlwaysOn was founded by Tony Perkins who was previously the creator and editor in chief of Red Herring and Upside.  I met Tony and some of his AlwaysOn colleagues last November at a breakfast roundtable in Palo Alto.  My blog is among those published by AlwaysOn.   

At the Stanford Innovation Summit I participated in a panel around the theme "Does America Still Have a Lock on Innovation?"  This is a subject being widely discussed, in particular whether the US can continue to be an innovation leader given the increasingly competitive world we live in.  An important companion question is whether it matters where innovation comes from, and whether talking about any country’s having a "lock on innovation" makes sense in our highly integrated, flat world.

The panel was moderated by Andreas Kluth, technology correspondent for The Economist, and included Robert Suh,  chief technology strategist at Accenture; Bill Tai, general partner at Charles River Ventures; and Netanel Jacobsson who describes himself as a "globetrotting entrepreneur with many strings on his harp."  Netanel also posted an entry on our panel in his blog.  The webcast of the panel appears here.