Enabling a Business Process Revolution

17 May 2005

An Academy Briefing
Tuesday 17 May 2005

The Academy is honoured that DR. IRVING WLADAWSKY-BERGER, IBM Vice President for Technical Strategy and Innovation, will address an Academy Briefing on Tuesday 17 May on the exciting topic of Services Science and the business process revolution that it will enable.

A digital revolution (led by continuing advances in IT) and an Internet revolution (born of open standards) are begetting a business process revolution. It, in turn, is creating conditions for a "perfect storm" of collaborative innovation with the potential to restructure individual enterprises and entire industries, perhaps even entire economies.

But for such a revolution to take hold, we need major advances in the design, construction, deployment and support of business processes and the underlying IT infrastructure. In particular, we need to evolve from today's labour-intensive, one-of-a-kind approaches to the use of sophisticated tools, engineering-like disciplines and methodologies, and standard business components. This will require significant innovation in the worlds of IT and of business. Just as it enabled us to produce the man made marvels of the physical world, the engineering model is the most promising way to deliver the sophisticated solutions that promise to revolutionize business processes and business itself.

Would a successful business process revolution reshape the world's economy? Might we see the emergence of collaborative industry ecosystems? Would it produce new levels of productivity? What would it mean for education, healthcare and standards of living? We cannot know definitively at this point: But it seems quite possible that some future historian will have to devise a term to distinguish this emerging era from the Industrial Revolution.

IRVING WLADAWSKY-BERGER

Vice President, Technical Strategy and Innovation
IBM Corporation

Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger is responsible for identifying emerging technologies and marketplace developments critical to the future of the IT industry, and organizing appropriate activities in and outside IBM in order to capitalize on them. In conjunction with that, he leads a number of key innovation-oriented activities and formulates technology strategy and public policy positions in support of them. As part of this effort, he is also responsible for the IBM Academy of Technology and the company's university relations office.

Dr. Wladawsky-Berger's role in IBM's response to emerging technologies began in December 1995 when he was charged with formulating IBM's strategy in the then emerging Internet opportunity, and developing and bringing to market leading-edge Internet technologies that could be integrated into IBM's mainstream business. He has led a number of IBM's companywide initiatives including Linux, IBM's Next Generation Internet efforts and its work on Grid computing. Most recently, he led IBM's On Demand business initiative.

He began his IBM career in 1970 at the Company's Thomas J. Watson Research Center where he started technology transfer programs to move the innovations of computer science from IBM's research labs into its product divisions. After joining IBM's product development organization in 1985, he continued his efforts to bring advanced technologies to the marketplace, leading IBM's initiatives in supercomputing and parallel computing including the transformation of IBM's large commercial systems to parallel architectures. He has managed a number of IBM's businesses, including the large systems software and the UNIX systems divisions.

Dr. Wladawsky-Berger is a member of the University of Chicago Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratories and of the Technology Advisory Council for BP International. He was co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, as well as a founding member of the Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A native of Cuba, he was named the 2001 Hispanic Engineer of the Year.

Dr. Wladawsky-Berger received an M.S. and a Ph. D. in physics from the University of Chicago.

[Download the presentation of Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger (2764KB)]