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The main presentation was given by William C. Sweeney, IBM Program Director of Internet Technology. Bill manages a team with a mission to accelerate the adoption of Internet technologies inside IBM by identifying promising new technologies, establishing prototypes and moving these prototypes into production. After a quick review of his department’s projects, Bill went in depth on a project that used instant text messaging to hand held devices as well as computers. The system was a grid computing application distributed worldwide on a web of computers programmed to collaborate with each other across the world-wide-web. The computers were donated to the project by collaborating departments within IBM. The project objective was to facilitate solutions to problems by posing them to collaborating individual employees via this system and getting quality responses in a timely fashion. Success for the project required a large mass of collaborating individuals willing to participate at a moment’s notice. The system, which has been in operation for some time, has exceeded expectations. The system allowed selecting from, and defining subjects of interest, geographic bounds, organizational bounds (like all development labs, division HQ, a manager’s staff, etc). Persons posing questions as well as persons acting as recipient candidates could choose the depth of their participation. Persons posing a question could also chose a general broadcast or a heuristic capability designed into the system. Activity tracking data is used by the system to provide the heuristic capability. The objective of the heuristic capability is to improve the turnaround time obtaining valid answers. Recipient candidates had no requirement to respond to specific messages beyond their desire to help a fellow IBMer and consideration for the local situation at the time of message receipt. There was strong audience participation both during and after Bill’s presentation. We are looking forward to a return visit next year. |
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