Is Your Value Measured by the Data on Your Hard Drive?

I joined IBM last August, with a blank slate. After 20 years as a PC user, I resisted retraining my hard earned, autonomous keyboard skills. Encouraged by my children and my colleagues, I took the plunge! The next day, my new Mac arrived just like it was Christmas morning. I logged in to find that my scroll bar was configured upside down. It scrolled down to go up and up to go down. Seriously?

So here I was with my first Mac and access to a vast, knowledge management system. Eagerly, I typed my first search, “cognitive computing” and I found 36,377 articles. Jackpot! (Not so fast). The first one was about Watson winning Jeopardy in 2011. Ok, good background. The next 10 were Powerpoint presentations with a single reference to cognitive or computing. The current white papers and leading research that I was hoping for must have been buried in the 36,377 articles or more likely, on the authors' hard drives.

I emailed my new boss. Where is the Watson search engine? “The what?”, she asked. “You know. Aren’t we using Watson for our knowledge management system?” She roared with laughter! She advised me to build my network and introduced me to a few thought leaders and change agents.

Sometimes it was challenging to wrestle the knowledge from the knowledge workers. Much of the information was on a “need to know basis”. Each time, I received a new “deck” I poured over it, coveted it, “googled” new concepts and read more from published researchers. My desktop folders began to fill with client proposals, webinars, architectural diagrams. Much of it was embedded in 58 page Powerpoints with 6 point type on every slide. Oh my!

I observed our clients during these presentations and their eyes glazed over as they started fumbling with their phones to check email. I read on Linked In that the average attention span has shrunk to 6 seconds and these slides could take 6 minutes each to read.

Fast forward to today. Watson is working diligently inside and outside of IBM. He is my search companion, my staffing assistant, and soon to be my digital agent. He knows my personality and says that Roberta Vinci is my alter ego at the U.S. Open – easy going, reserved and analytical .

Did you know that Watson went to film school and created a trailer for “Morgan” with 20th Century Fox? I’m afraid of Thrillers but Watson makes the movie seem intriguing and the clip has over 1M hits on YouTube in 1 day – among the top 3 ever on IBM.com.

This brings me back to my question about our value on our hard drives. This summer, I’ve had the privilege to work with IBM’s millennial “consultants by degrees” from the top business schools. They are highly motivated, responsive and hungry for knowledge. I’ve been sharing the data on my hard drive and they’ve been inspired to craft stories, videos and graphics to rock our clients’ world!

So much for the millennial lack of work ethic. Give them something fabulous to work on with new data to devour and magic happens! What’s on your hard drive?