Irving Wladawsky-Berger

The 2007 IBM Business Leadership Forum

I found it particularly fitting that my first professional activity following my retirement from IBM was to participate in IBM's fifth Business Leadership Forum (BLF), which took place the first week in June in Saint Petersburg, Russia. 

The 2007 BLF was a truly global event, including over 500 attendees from 75 different countries.  The focus of the conference was innovation in a globally connected world - both to discuss how the forces of globalization all around us are setting the innovation agenda for the future, as well as how this very innovation agenda can - must -  help us address the inevitable and very complex problems associated with living in a fast-changing, globally connected world. 

I could not possibly do justice to the richness of the BLF in one blog, so I will focus on the comments of three of the CEOs that addressed the audience.   Blogs on the BLF were also posted by John Patrick and Doug Levin.

A Matter of World Views

Given the complexity of the world we live in, it is important to have a kind of World View to help guide our actions and decisions.  This is particularly important if you are a public figure, because what you do and say can have an impact on so many people.

In the last couple of weeks I read two articles involving public figures that offer very different lessons for the world we live in, one representing a view that we should embrace, the second a view that we should all aim to distance ourselves from.

The June 2 issue of The Economist has an excellent article – “What I Have Learned” by Tony Blair – a reflection on his ten years as British Prime Minister.  A central theme in the article is Mr. Blair's strong belief that we all have a clear self-interest in what happens all over the world, given that "interdependence [is] the defining characteristic of the modern world." 

We don't know how history will judge him, but regardless of how you feel about Tony Blair and his government, his reflections deserve our attention.  I was particularly impressed by the section titled “We must stand up for our values,” in which Mr. Blair offers us a very eloquent, compelling world view.

Blogging in the Next Phase of My Career

I started this blog in May of 2005.  Over the next year, I found the experience of writing a blog so exciting and interesting that I posted several entries on my thoughts about blogging the following August and December, and then again in May of 2006. 

One of the comments I got on this May 2006 entry was that "You know that someone has run out of things to say when they start blogging about blogging."  I guess I took that comment to heart, because until now I have refrained from writing any new entries on blogging itself.  While I am still very much enjoying the experience, it is no longer new.  For the most part, it now feels that posting an entry in my blog once a week has become part of my work routine.

But given my June 1 retirement from IBM - and despite my continuing, part-time association with the company - I have been wondering what new direction my blog might take.  Are there subjects that, consciously or not, I refrained from writing about as an IBM executive that I now feel free to tackle?  How will my increased involvement with universities - such as MIT, the University of Chicago and Imperial College - start to influence both the content and style of my blog?    

The short answer is that I don't know.  From the beginning, I have looked at my blog as something personal, written by a long-time professional in the IT industry who happens to be employed by IBM - not the other way around.  The same IBM colleagues who encouraged me to start my blog to begin with, advised me to assume this point of view.  They also suggested that I post my entries in an outside blogging site, not one of the IBM sites that many employees use for their internal and external blogs.

The NYPD Real Time Crime Center

On May 3 we held our fourth Innovation Lecture in the series jointly sponsored by IBM and MIT's Engineering Systems Division.  Systems Solutions to Real World Challenges at NYPD: The Real-Time Crime Center was delivered by Jim Onalfo, CIO and Deputy Commissioner of the New York Police Department (NYPD) .

The NYPD is the largest municipal police force in the world.  It handles 11.5 million 911 calls, sends out 4.5 million police cars on radio runs, is responsible for 45,000 prosecutions and has a staff of roughly 53,000 people, of which over 37,000 are police officers.  The NYPD is led by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, to whom Jim Onalfo directly reports.

From the moment a crime is detected and reported, and throughout its investigation, police departments have become very good at generating broad and diverse streams of information related to that crime.  However, it has been very difficult to bring all that information together along with the proper tools to make it usable in practice.  When Ray Kelly was appointed by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to his second term as NYPD commissioner in 2002, he entered the job with a key vision:  let police officers focus on what they do best - solve crimes and apprehend criminals - by freeing them from the overwhelming paperwork they have to deal with, and providing them with the systems and tools they need to quickly find the information required to do the job.