Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Skills for the 21st Century - Engineering Systems Solutions to Real World Challenges

As technology continues to permeate all aspects of business, society and our personal lives, the possibilities for innovation seem truly endless.  But realizing these possibilities requires talent, - the best trained technical talent, - so more than ever, our engineers and scientists are essential to innovation.  They must master a wide range of interdisciplinary skills to create effective, resilient systems solutions to the increasingly complex problems they are called on to solve, and be able to recognize those critical enablers and inhibitors to marketplace success that can emerge along the technical, business, organizational, and societal boundaries.

Over the past decade, several studies have considered how to restructure engineering education and other technical educational programs to better equip students with the skills required for 21st century careers.  They have all pretty much concluded that a technical education must be more diverse, broad and forward-looking than in the past.  Sophisticated applications - such as those increasingly encountered in business, health care, government and education - require the ability to comprehend, synthesize and integrate lots of different factors into a holistic, human-oriented design.  This is very complex indeed.   

When examining educational programs that address complex systems, one finds that universities generally do a pretty good job of teaching the base, foundational skills.  However, a proper education in complex systems should be complemented with concrete, real-life examples or case studies of how businesses and other institutions are using engineering systems to address complex problems in their organizations. 

That is why the Innovation Lecture Series: Engineering Systems Solutions to Real World Challenges was organized.  The series is co-sponsored by MIT's Engineering Systems Division and IBM University Relations as part of its Skills for the 21st Century initiative.  In each seminar, a business or technical leader will discuss a real-life example of how they leveraged advanced technologies and how they applied disciplined systems and management thinking to a variety of problems in their organizations.  Acting in my role as Visiting Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, I host the seminars and moderate the Q&A session.

Information - It’s All Around Us

Last week IBM announced a new kind of software platform, IBM Information Server, designed to help businesses and other organizations integrate and derive more value from the disparate sources of information that are spread across their systems.  The announcement was made at a major conference we held in Anaheim, Information on Demand 2006.  I participated in the conference and led a discussion on Technology and Innovation with a panel of some of our top technical experts in information management in IBM.

We are so surrounded by information in our everyday lives that we don't notice it.  It is like the air we breathe.  Information comes at us from all sides.  Some of it is well structured, such as our bills, financial statements and pay stubs. Most of it is highly unstructured - TV programs, movies, newspapers, books, pictures, conversations, phone calls and e-mails, for example. 

From its inception, the IT industry has been dealing with information.  After all, the "I" in IT stands for Information.  Before the term IT became widely used, we generally referred to commercial computing as Data Processing, because that is what commercial applications did - they processed data stored in highly structured file and database systems.  But, while data and information in general have always been a major part of the IT industry, until relatively recently the key focus of the industry has been on applications and their underlying platforms and development tools, rather than on information and related technologies.

Beyond Technology and Automation

Last week, I wrote about complex systems and services, and the various conferences on these subjects that I had attended in the previous two weeks.  I concluded my blog entry by saying:  "It is particularly gratifying that while technology is the catalyst enabling such a [business] transformation, our biggest breakthrough is our newfound ability to integrate people into all aspects of our systems designs."  I'd like to elaborate on that thought.

Because of advances in technology, in particular information technologies, all kinds of new opportunities have arisen for applying IT in innovative ways in business, society and our personal lives.  In general, when we think of technology-based innovations, especially in complex problems, we think of automation, that is, applying those technologies to automate tasks or processes previously done “by hand.”  Machines and automation have been the hallmarks of technology-based revolutions over the last couple of centuries starting with the Industrial Revolution.

Since the early days of computers in the 1960s, we naively assumed that it was only a matter of time and of our computers becoming faster and cheaper before we would similarly apply technology to automate major human capabilities like intelligence, knowledge and natural language understanding.  While much progress has indeed been made in those areas in the ensuing forty years, it is fair to say that artificial intelligence, knowledge management and natural language processing are known as much for their exaggerated claims and failures as for their many successful applications such as Deep Blue and the Mars Exploration Rovers.

People-Oriented, Services-Intensive, Market-Facing Complex Systems

In the last couple of weeks I have been immersed in complex systems, services and related subjects.  First, on Tuesday, September 26 I gave a talk entitled "At the Threshold of a 21st Century Business Revolution" at the 2006 MIT Engineering Systems Conference – the theme of which was Complex Systems, Complex Times: Reflections on the 21st Century Enterprise.  Later that same week, I participated in a two day workshop on Complex Engineered, Organizational and Natural Systems sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

A week later, on October 6 and 7, IBM sponsored a conference on Education for the 21st Century focused on the emerging discipline of Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME).  My role was that of wrap-up speaker at the end of the first day. 

In my comments I recapped not just the IBM SSME conference but what I had heard at the three meetings I attended in the previous two weeks.  In particular, I said that the two main themes of these meetings - complex systems and services - are very similar areas around which we are framing the very complicated problems of business and societal systems that we are trying to understand.

Leveraging the Wisdom of Communities to Help in Intellectual Property Reform

Last week IBM announced a new worldwide policy governing the creation and management of patents.  Our new IP policy is based on four key tenets:

• Patent applicants are responsible for the quality and clarity of their patent applications.
• Patent applications should be available for public examination.
• Patent ownership should be transparent and easily discernible.
• Pure business methods without technical merit should not be patentable.

The details of our announcement have been well covered in a number of good press articles, such as this one and this one.  So, I’d like to focus this blog entry on the process that led us to this IP policy, and in particular, how we leveraged the wisdom of expert communities to help us arrive at the decision to make the announcement, as well as the actual content of the policy.  I think that this represents a very interesting example of how companies like IBM need increasingly to manage their key strategies, especially those with important societal implications.