Posts Tagged ‘MIT’

“Dear Mr. Watson, My employment with IBM has been terminated” (More Loose Cannons)

November 3, 2009

Dilbert.com

There was a birthday celebration of sorts last week.  From the October 29th edition of  ABC News Science & Technology:

While the actual date of the Internet’s birthday is somewhat debated, many say that the Internet was born 40 years ago today at the University of California, Los Angeles, when a computer to computer message was sent for the first time from the UCLA campus to Stanford.

At the time, Leonard Kleinrock and his colleagues were charged with developing the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or ARPANET), a government-funded research project in global computer communications that eventually grew into the Internet.

I thought it would be a good occasion to  reflect on how easy it is for Loose Cannons to get smashed by colliding worlds.

In the days before ARPANET, computer-to-computer communications were homogeneous, and computer manufacturers liked it that way. The very idea of not owning every aspect of a technology stack seemed to be ridiculous.  Where’s the value if you can get critical components from anywhere?  What if competitors start using the same suppliers?  Heads of business units hated the idea, but Loose Cannons kept proposing technical architectures that looked, well, open.  The idea was playing out in many ways in many companies.

At IBM, two architectural revolutions were simultaneously  underway. We now know that they were related. In the summer of  1980, IBM executive Bill Lowe prepared to brief  the company’s Management Committee on development plans  for a personal computer:

It was a dangerous place to be.  The Management Committee — or, given IBMers’ fondness for acronyms, the MC — ruled on issues that couldn’t be resolved at lower corporate levels, so going before the committee was, to IBMers, like going before the Supreme Court.  It was actually rougher because the top IBM executives who sat in judgment were known to be brutal, especially if they thought someone was wasting their time.[1]

Bill Lowe had been beaten up by the MC before, but this time Lowes’ plan to use outside suppliers drew polite questions from MC members who expressed some concern about turning over even partial control of any of their businesses to “outsiders.” What Lowe and the vast majority of IBM engineers didn’t know was that earlier in the year the MC had received a  forecast for global PC sales that showed a peak market of 80,000 units in that began to rapidly decline in 1984 as the specialized customer  need for computers was satiated:

IBM had already been embarrassed by early missteps in the PC market but the corporate culture was focused on mainframes and services.  Problems might be created by opening up the hardware and software architecture of personal computers, but

The general attitude…was that you don’t have big problems in small markets, and we thought the personal computer was a very small market.[1]

The MC might have been more inclined to turn its attention to a market that had real legs.  Like, say, networking.  Ed Hendricks was an engineer at IBM’s Federal Systems Division in San Diego.  Hendricks had helped design VNET, at that time the largest computer network in the world.  VNET was  IBM’s internal corporate network, linking IBM mainframes at scientific data centers.  By 1980, VNET was a global asset with hundreds of  hosts in North America, Europe and Asia.

Meanwhile, ARPANET was growing into the Internet, and Ed Hendricks was interested in how IBM’s technology would continue to prosper when the world started connecting IBM mainframes to large UNIVAC computers, HP mini-computers,  PC’s, and supercomputers from Cray or Control Data.  Hendricks became an industry player in this arena, collaborating with my colleague Larry Landweber at the University of Wisconsin as the expansion of the ARPANET began in earnest. Ed  Hendrick’s IBM Internet Gateway Project was aimed squarely at insuring that IBM mainframes would not be stranded in a world in which they could only talk to each other:

The objective of this project is to begin to bridge the gap between IBM computer systems and network technology predominant among government agencies, conractors and universities.  More specifically, we are working to develop according to DOD standards the technical capacity to interconect networks of IBM computers and systems to similar but different computer networks used by government agencies and their affiliates.

Hendrick’s website preserves the sometimes heated but  thoughtful and deep technical discussions — involving Hendricks,  the legendary Jim Gray, and MIT’s Jerry Saltzer, among others –  that took place througout 1980 about the relative merits of ARPANET and IBM’s networking strategy. For reasons that are still unclear, IBM decided to move the Internet Gateway Project to IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, an effort that Hendricks calls “screwy.”   Hendricks along with team members Gerot “Mike” Engel and Dale Johnson planned to spend a week at Yorktown Heights, getting comfortable with IBM Research’s Systems Laboratory, their proposed  new home:

…the Systems Laboratory was created to focus more directly on perceived business needs. Consequently, Systems Laboratory projects are evaluated and prioritized on the basis “leverage” they exert on the software product line…by design, ninety-five percent of the work carried out in the Systems Laboratory is so closely related to strategic product development that it cannot be discussed outside IBM.

Shocked, the Internet Gateway team concluded:

…a project such as ours which is intended to establish internet communication compatible across differing systems…could not be carried out under such guidelines.  Our overall reaction…was that the ARPANet Internet Gateway project could not have been started within the Systems Laboratory.

They concluded that if the project was to have any chance at all of success, there would need to be a formal review of management decisions, what  IBM called the “Open Door” process.

March 14, 1981

John R. Opel, President IBM Corporation

Dear Mr. Opel,

This letter is intended to invoke the IBM Open Door Policy.  My purpose in requesting this Open Door is to seek clarification of the decisions which led to a situation where a project which is clearly critical to IBM’s future posture in the data communications industry cannot be pursued…Bureaucratic accomodation for only that which is in the strategic plan is a very dangerous posture to be in while the data processing and communication industry is rapidly evolving.

[My team and I] have been working to carry out a project to establish a capacity…to cooperate with the U.S. Government and University Computer Science departments in the evolution of techniques to interconnect dissimilar computer networks…There is essentially unanimous agreement that this activity promises important advances for IBM and for computer technology in general.

In September 0f 1980 we were notified by our management that this work could not be carried out…On each occasion when this qustion [of where the work could be carried out in IBM] was being escalated to the proper level, my management would insist that I leave the management issue to them and to concentrate my own efforts of the technical work.

Last week I was informed verbally that no sponsorship for this project could be found.  My manager asked where hie should look to find me a job. My position was…that inability to find organizational sponsorship for the project is not equivalent to a decision that IBM should not be involved in developing the capacity to interconnect IBM networks to government and university networks…to look for other professional opportunities now and give up attempts to pursue this technology…would be to let the company down….

Sincerely yours,

Gernot Engel

19 March 1981

Mr. Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Chairman Emeritus

Dear Mr. Watson,

My employment with IBM has been terminated as a consequence of recent management decision which are incompatible with my professional goals…I believe I am justified in requesting more thorough and explicit responses to the following questions:

  1. What “business needs required the termination of our ARPANET Interconnection Gatweway Project and the abandonment of the…professionals we had been dealing with?
  2. What factors prevented alternative organizational arrangements that would have allowed our group to continue its work within IBM?
  3. What is IBM’s posture regarding professional cooperation with the computer scientists working in association with DARPA…to establish mutual techniques for interconnection of dissimilar computer networks?…

Sincerely yours,

Gernot Engel

May 15, 1981

John R. Opel, President IBM Corp.

Dear Mr. Opel,

On March 4, 1981 I sent a letter to your office requesting clarification of a decision which cancelled the internet gateway project…Your office’s attempt to analyze the internet decision appears to be stalled because it was handed back to middle management….I can only conclude in this instance the Open Door Policy has failed. My recommendation to salvage the situation is that you give fifteen minutes of your time to receive a presentation on the internet project and attempt to evaluation for yourself the value of this project to IBM’s future.”

Sincerely yours,

Gernot Engel

May 19, 1981

Dear Mr. Engel,

I have reviewed the results of [the] investigation into your concerns.  Your disappointment with the decision to terminate the VNET/ARPANET project is understandable; however, I conclude the decision was properly based on the need to fund other Ad Tech projects with greater business potential…

I understand you are currently considering a return to IBM, and I hope you choose to do so.

Siuncerely,

John R. Opel

Number 1-81: September 11, 1981 MANAGEMENT BRIEFING

TO ALL IBM MANAGERS:

Organizations seem to have an irresistable tendency to codify successful practices in rules, instructions and controls which soon begin to take the place of judgement. When that happens, the result is bureaucracy.

IBM is not immune.  Earlier this year, reports from many sources indicated to me that a growing bureaucracy is affecting the performance of our business…corporate staff heads, group executives, and the division presidents are exploring ways to reduce unnecessary controls, rules and approvals in their areas of responsibility…We will succeed in that effort only if you managers, at every level of the business,k are willing to stand up and fight bureaucracy wherever you find it…If you have all the information to make a decision, make it…

[signed by John Opel, president]

John Opel stepped down as IBM president in January 1985 and chairman in May 1986.  He was succeed by John Akers, and he was succeeded by Lou Gerstner in 1993. Gerstner, the former CEO of RJR Nabisco, described his transformation of IBM in “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?”[2].  Most observers agree that critical to IBM’s turnaround that took it from a free fall in the early 1980′s to unquestioned market  leadership in computers, software and services was the dismantling of a remote, hierarchical management culture that squeezed innovation in political pincers.  By the time I took over the computing research directorship at the National Science Foundation in the late 1980′s, IBM had become a major player in the growth of the Internet [3]:

In the mid-1980s, NSF decided the time was right to try to link its regional university networks and its supercomputer centers together. This initial effort was called NSFNET.
By 1987, participation in the new NSFNET project grew so rapidly that NSF knew it had to expand the capacity of this new network. In November of that year, it awarded a grant to a consortium of IBM, MCI, and a center at the University of Michigan called Merit to create a network of networks—or inter-net—capable of carrying data at speeds up to 56 kilobits a second. By July, 1987, this new system was up and running. The modern Internet was born.

REFERENCES

1. Paul Carroll, Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1994

2. Louis V. Gerstner, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround, Collins, 2002

3. National Science Foundation, NSF and the Birth of the Internet, http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/textonly/index.jsp

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Edupunk: It’s Alien vs Predator With Relevance of Universities at Stake

October 14, 2009

Much to my daughter’s dismay, I like Green Day.  Maybe they’ve mellowed since the early 90’s.  Maybe I just need overdriven guitars and liberally sprinkled f-bombs to balance my ITunes™ playlists.  There is no doubt however that there was much concern in the family when I proclaimed 21st Century Breakdown album of the decade: “My Dad can’t like my favorite band!” I’ll admit I was slow to come around.  Back in the days before Georgia Tech had a College of Computing, the School of Information and Computer Science had a punk rock band with a marginally offensive name, and it didn’t catch my fancy.  Band members are now highly regarded professors at Georgia State, Vanderbilt and Clemson.  It took me twenty-five years but I’m starting to see the point.

On the other hand, I got the point of Edupunk right away:

[it] is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission.[1]

According to Jim Groom, the educational technology specialist at Virginia’s University of Mary Washington who invented the term “Edupunk”, “The whole idea is a reaction to the over-engineered, badly designed and intellectually constraining technology that has been foisted onto the American higher education system as a substitute for deep reflection about what universities should be evolving into.” Just like the early punk rockers invented forms for themselves, Edupunk is a catchy — and cheerily anarchistic –  way of thinking about DIY in educational technology. Like the punk rockers, Edupunkers don’t mind alienating the  establishment.  They are not without adult supervision, though.

There is a growing punk movement among mainstream educators, a reaction to recent trends in American higher education that in their view are taking colleges down a dead-end path. It is a sentiment that I share.  I’ll have more to say about the Edupunk movement in my book on the Fate of American Colleges and Universities in the 21st Century, but there is an interesting WWC collision at work here, and since I had such a great response to Dancing With the Stars,  I thought it was worth mentioning it.

No less authority than Clayton Christensen (of Innovator’s Dilemma fame) has noticed that higher education has gone all-in for an organizing principle that equates factory-like efficiency with effectiveness.  His 2008 book with Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn[2] is  a complete and damning analysis of the approach to standardized higher education that fires the Edupunk movement.

I was stuck between worlds when I was Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.  On one hand, I was a prime customer for technology that would genuinely improve operations in an environment where generating a payroll report or even simple analytics to predict enrollments seemed beyond the organization’s capability. On the other hand, I watched in horror the purchase and deployment of  expensive, awkward course management systems (CMS) that are the educational equivalent of the industrial-weight enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems  used to connect customer acquisition and financial processes to supply chain systems in large corporations.  You could almost hear Clay Christensen’s “Tut-tut!” as briefing after briefing made it clear that CMS was there to group and chunk and synchronize when, in the classroom, the real need was for specialization and personalization.

Six-sigma has hit higher education, and trends like CMS and outcome-based assessment combined with layer after layer of accreditation and bureaucratic program review — with their focus on documents, processes and repeatability – are exactly what has  the Edupunks up in arms.  Edupunk has with increasing frequency attracted the attention of VC’s like Union Square Ventures (think Twitter), whose Hacking Education conference brought together long-tail innovators and others who believe that one-size fits all standardized institutions have a real problem.

I’ll let you decide which roles are played by Alien and Predator, but I want to be clear about my vote: factory models have no place in colleges and universities. There are no statistical control charts for higher education, and models borrowed from manufacturing and social science are leading college administrators seriously astray.  The real disruptors are MIT’s Open Courseware, peer-to-peer tutoring of the sort I talked about in last week’s post, games, social networking sites like Atlanta’s OpenStudy.com, and online exchanges. These are the worlds that are colliding, and if they do, the next economic bubble to burst will be American higher education.

[1] How Web-Savvy Edupunks are Transforming Higher Education” by Anya Kamanetz, Fast Company, September 1, 2009

[2] Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, McGraw-hill

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Dancing with the Stars (of Pure Math)

October 5, 2009

Even casual iTunes™ users know about iTunesU™, the increasingly rich video-taped course offerings from universities as great as Stanford and Oxford and as humble as the dozens of community colleges and adult education programs that make their curricula available for free downloading. I should have seen it coming in the spring of 2001 when Charles Vest – then president of MIT – paid me a visit at HP to tell me of his plans to make MIT’s entire course catalog available for download on the internet, but I was not thinking much about Higher Education as a market in those days.

Things changed in late 2002 when I started to draw a paycheck from a university and began to think hard about the fate of American colleges and universities in the 21st century.  What Chuck Vest predicted one afternoon in my Palo Alto office is now being played out in what I believe is the next economic bubble.  This is quite literally the collision of that half of the earth’s population that has in the last decade joined the free market economy with the inwardly focused world of  Americah higher education, which – unless there are some dramatic changes – is destined to be a marginalized bystander to events that it is ill-equipped to understand.  Here is the stark reality: enhanced technology means that the market for higher education now has many suppliers, and the  hundreds of millions of people who all of a sudden want a university education also find that they have abundant choices, often with lower cost and high quality.    In any market with abundant choices, the winners are inevitably those with compelling brands, price, or value.  There are about 3,500 accredited colleges and universities in the US, and, except for the handful (less than a hundred) who have global brands, most of them have not figured out how to deliver their value at an acceptable price.  In fact, an alarming large number of them cannot even articulate their value to the world that is rushing toward them.  That spells trouble. I will have much more to say about WWC and higher education in later posts.

I am working on a book on this topic so these problems are much on my mind these days, but an email message from a colleague prompted me write that there may be a series of smaller collisions rather than a single cataclysm.

There is a lot of criticism about the quality of iTunesU lectures and online courses.  Some criticism can be dismissed as an “innovator’s dilemma” confusion of the current state  — much of it admittedly primitive – of the technology with its disruptive power.  I find this criticism easy to dismiss because you can see quality of online instruction improving month by month.  Never underestimate the power of technology curves.  The more difficult question is how exactly the technology can replace a skilled human mentor who has ability to interact directly with her students.

Then two e-mails from my friend Dick Lipton showed up.  “Hit 7,000 page views today!” said the first one.  A few hours later: “We were number 20 on WordPress!”  That’s 20 out of roughly 3 million WordPress posts.  Dick is a world-class computational theorist, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and one of the best teachers I have ever known.  He is a star.  He has been blogging pure math for the last year at a website called “G̈ödel’s Lost Letter¨.  Not exactly the stuff you would expect to be in the top  .0007% of all of those posts about Michael Jackson, Death Panels, and the 2016 Olympics.  His latest series “Reasons for Believing P = NP” has been exceptionally popular, drawing hundreds of comments from experts, novices, interested amateurs, and a few cranks.  We have been collaborators for many years. Our offices used to share a common wall.  I know Dick’s voice when he is engaged with his students.  It has a distinctive rhythm and is louder when he is trying to extract a missing argument from a reluctant pupil.  It was the voice I heard when I read his blog, and as I thought about his 7,000 viewers it occurred to me that Dick’s seminar was no longer 10 or 15 graduate students crowded around a white board.  This is not an on-line lecture or an iTunes™ videos. I thought, “This is what the teacher-mentor relationship is like when the technology enables a classroom of 7,000 students.”  When there are abundant choices, students will choose this.

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