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Kate Ehrlich
Micropractice Leader -- Collaboration
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"Successful collaboration requires an improbable alliance between business, technology, research and consulting."
While studying how people search for information, Kate Ehrlich observed that customer support professionals build their knowledge base by routinely sharing stories about customers and their problems. The realization that searching, and finding answers in general, was tied to personal knowledge rather than to any particular search engine skill was the “aha” moment that led Kate to focus her work on collaboration. Her background in psychology and cognitive science made her particularly well suited for collaboration projects at Lotus Research and Kate followed this initial research with an early prototype for instant messaging and a simple Notes-based recommendation system.
Over the years, Kate realized that the technology used to enable collaboration was not enough to address the human factors that allowed for effective collaboration. At the same time, she realized that it would take more than focusing on social and cultural issues to the exclusion of technology to integrate collaboration into enterprise systems. It would take an unprecedented alliance between technologists, knowledge management experts and business professionals to make collaboration work.
Leaving the protected research world for several years, Kate worked as a consultant and solution leader for an innovative consulting company. Her exposure to hard business reality gave Kate an idea of how collaboration should be addressed and could be made sustainable -- lessons she used upon her return to IBM. "Always begin with business goals," she advises. "While collaboration is desirable, it is not a goal in itself. We shouldn’t be telling people to ‘go forth and collaborate’." She believes that by staying close to business goals, collaboration generates value through:
It is also important to ensure that collaboration -- especially spontaneous, opportunistic collaboration - supports codified business processes. With a focus on business goals and process, the alliance between business, technology, research and consulting is transformed into a powerful team.
As the leader of the IBM Research Services Collaboration micropractice, Kate thoroughly enjoys the challenge of bringing diverse people and perspectives of different disciplines together to create client solutions. When not collaborating, she likes to spend time with her family, travel and cook.