The company's Almaden Services Research group, a 22-employee outfit based in Silicon Valley, has set out on a mission to discover--and then hopefully exploit--quantifiable, predictive principles that underlie the delivery of technology services.The binary opposition between art and science has always been a barrier to effective technologies (and to understanding how people and cultures actually use/are used by technologies and technical systems). Technology is primarily an issue of communication (in both its technical and humanistic aspects). Computers aren't about coding per se, but about uses.In other words, IBM is combining anthropology, game theory and behavioral economics with technologies from its labs to see if it can make corporate processes run smoother. The first person recruited from outside IBM to join the group was, in fact, an anthropologist.
[via CNET News.com]
Posted by johndan at April 29, 2004 01:55 PM
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