Here's a bold prediction: the biggest impact of network computing won't
be electronic commerce or global communication. The biggest impact will be in
organizational learning a decidedly unglamorous, academic-sounding concept, but
one with dramatic implications for IBM and our customers.
Learning is knowledge in action a technology tested, a product delivered, a
strategy deployed. Organizations, like people, can learn from their actions and
use that learning to make better decisions. They can refine the technology,
improve the product, rethink the strategy. The problem is that many
organizations don't learn quickly enough, causing them to waste resources and
lose opportunities.
Today, with competition moving at Web speed, organizations must rev up the
cycle to act, learn from their actions and translate learning into customer
value, all at an ever-increasing pace. Whats exciting about network computing is
the potential for building knowledge-based tools that will enable organizations
to become smarter faster.
In the networked era, successful organizations will be learning
organizations. Just as mainframe computing automated back-office operations, and
client/server technology automated entire departments, network computing will
automate the sharing of knowledge throughout the enterprise. Equally important,
businesses will share their knowledge with partners, suppliers and customers and
get new knowledge in return.
Right now, most businesses don't take full advantage of their intellectual
assets, because knowledge isnt widely shared. New technologies find their way to
product development teams all right, but what about, say, the experience of a
marketing team in Japan? Is that learning available to another marketing team in
the U.S.? What about the knowledge that each of us holds in our individual
memory bank?
Imagine the impact and the competitive advantages if a corporation could
capture all of this knowledge, deliver it across the enterprise, and make
decisions based on the collective know-how of its worldwide organization.
We are working with several customers to create knowledge-based systems that
will enable complex organizations to learn in much the same way that individuals
learn. We envision systems that will "remember" important decisions,
as well as the assumptions that lie behind them; that will record the results of
actions taken; that will "sense" the markets response to a strategic
move, giving decision makers the agility to shift direction quickly when they
need to.
The power of such systems will be not just their speed, but their ability to
pull together collective resources and deploy them over the network. Think of it
this way: just as Deep Blue drew upon the expertise of multiple grandmasters
whose strategies were stored in its memory, a learning organization will be able
to compete with the accumulated knowledge of its employees and business partners
at its disposal. And, like Deep Blue, technology will accelerate the
deliberative process as the organization considers its next move.
Lotus Notes® provides an infrastructure for individuals, teams and
business partners to collaborate, make decisions, learn and share knowledge. But
Notes is just the beginning. We are also developing ways to integrate learning
with core management processes, which eventually will lead to a series of
network-based knowledge management solutions that we can deliver to the
marketplace.
These solutions will enable IBM to take full advantage of our intellectual
assets. More important, they will enable us to help customers become learning
organizations as well. Thats when the impact of network computing will truly
resound.
J. Bruce Harreld is IBM's senior vice president of strategy
