Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Marty Reilly – In Memoriam

I have long enjoyed giving keynotes and presentations, as well as talking to the press and analysts.  But an appreciation for writing is something I only discovered very late in my career when I started doing this blog a couple of years ago.  But, when I think about it, I should not have been surprised.  A late-life love of writing is something I got through osmosis from my long time friend and colleague Marty Reilly, who died on May 20, 2007. 

For many years Marty worked in Executive Communications at IBM.  He was known as one of the top speechwriters in the company.  It was my luck that about fourteen years ago or so we started working closely together.  Marty indeed wrote my speeches, but that does not begin to describe our relationship.

A Few Thoughts on a Long Career

Last week I attended one of my favorite events of the year, IBM's annual Corporate Technology Recognition Event (CTRE).  At the CTRE we recognize and reward individuals and teams who made significant technical contributions to IBM and to the world of science and technology.  We also announce our newest IBM Fellows, the company's most prestigious technical honor. 

Given my imminent retirement, this year's CTRE took on a particularly nostalgic feeling.  It is interesting for me to think about the arc my professional career has taken, much of it spent among members of our technical community, like those being honored at the CTRE.  I like to think back to decisions I made at various forks in the road and how they turned out, as well as on the impact of circumstances that were beyond my control.  After a while, amidst the various zigs and zags, a definite pattern started to emerge in my career, a pattern that I could not have anticipated but had to discover as I went along.

SOA, Services and Business Architecture

At the end of May, I will be participating in an IBM sponsored conference - Impact 2007.  The conference will focus on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), " ...  a business-centric IT architectural approach that supports integrating your business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services."  SOA is being embraced by an increasing number of companies because it helps them build a more flexible IT foundation that can respond quickly to rapidly changing business conditions and user requirements.

There are many ways to view SOA, but to me its most compelling features are the introduction of standard, modular, interchangeable components to the world of software.  This enables developers to build composite applications by drawing upon pre-defined components from multiple sources within and beyond the enterprise.

The introduction of standard, interchangeable parts was one of the critical innovations that helped bring about the Industrial Revolution a couple of centuries ago and ushered in the concept of mass production in many different kinds of industries.  Modern engineering practices - especially those used for developing complex systems or objects like airplanes, bridges and microprocessors, - are built around the concept of standard, modular components.  Such components are a pre-requisite for sophisticated tools like those used in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Supply Chain Management. 

These kinds of advanced engineering, mass production, and similar capabilities have brought large productivity improvements to the manufacturing of physical goods in countries around the world.  However, in services - which in advanced economies like those of the US, the UK and Japan account for roughly 75% of GDP and a similar percentage of the labor force - productivity improvements have been significantly slower.  This is largely because in the people-intensive service sector of the economy, we have not been able to bring to bear the kinds of engineering and production capabilities that have been successfully applied in manufacturing, including standard, modular components and engineering-based tools and processes.

21st Century Grand Challenges

On May 25, 1961, President John F Kennedy addressed a  joint session of Congress and said "...I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.  No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish... "

President Kennedy's historic speech served as a call to arms to the nation.  By issuing a near-impossible Grand Challenge, President Kennedy brought together all the key constituencies in academia, industry and government that needed to work closely together to make his challenge a reality.  The goal was achieved with the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969.      

In the 1980s, the US scientific and engineering community issued its own Grand Challenges, that is, a set of fundamental problems of great importance to the nation, the solution of which required breakthrough improvements across all dimensions of supercomputing, including technology components, hardware architecture, software, algorithms, programming tools and applications.  They also required close collaboration among academia, industry and government, as well as between the developers and users of advanced supercomputers. 

Some of the key grand challenge applications being pursued at the time were the study of computational fluid dynamics for designing hypersonic planes; weather forecasting for short and long term effects; the efficient recovery of oil; molecular design calculations; and nuclear weapons simulations.

These efforts culminated in the federal government’s launching the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative (HPCCI) and the National Information infrastructure (NII) in the early 1990s.  These programs contributed greatly to the huge advances in the power of supercomputers over the next decade, as well as to the well known explosion of the Internet into the larger society in the mid ‘90s.