Jeff Eisen

Today and tomorrow is "Innovation Workshop 2006" at Lotus in Cambridge.

That's the yearly event where the IBM research folks and many development folks get together and do a show and tell of various research projects (related to Lotus software) and discuss where the research focus should be for the coming year.

I thought I'd use this opportunity to discuss an innovation coming in Hannover that started with our friends in research.

Activity-centric computing began as a project in IBM research a few years ago.  It made its first product appearance in the Workplace Managed Client as "Activity Explorer", but has since morphed from a single product in a single UI to a much more open platform around collaboration using RSS/Atom feeds and Rest style APIs.  The open approach of activities allows the integration of Activity-centric computing in Hannover, Sametime, MS Office, older version of Notes, browsers, and elsewhere -- pretty much anywhere you have e-mail or an HTTP stack.

The tag line around Activity-centric computing is:

Organize work around the activities people do, rather than the tools they use

 Here's a presentation that was given on it at Lotusphere this year by Jason Dumont

I've been struggling answering the question in an easily graspable manner of how activities (ok, I'm tired of typing "activity-centric computing") is really different from other related paradigms such as discussion databases, teamrooms, Quickplaces, and the like.  The answer struck me recently with a simple real world example.  

I wanted to collaborate with some colleagues on how we should integrate a certain technology into our portfolio.   The set of colleagues was those interested in this particular topic, but it was definitely not a "To:" list I have ever used before.   Would I set up a whole database or teamroom or Quickplace for just this set of people for something I expected to last just a few days.  No way -- too heavyweight for the task.   Without activities, I probably would have started an e-mail thread and I bet you would have too.  But, after the activity started, I ended up added a few more people to the fray.  Not too easy in an e-mail thread if you need to bring everyone up to speed and make sure they all get included on all the replies, etc.  An activity worked great for the task and I was able to easily add chats, web pages, attachments, and other contents to the activity.   Just too easy.

A lot of work on "activities" has clearly been done by the development teams, but a lot of ongoing work has also been done by research, continuing to drive different ideas around making Activity-centric computing more useful, intuitive, visually appealing, etc.  What's coming in Hannover is pretty powerful -- what's coming later even more so.  

It's always a great challenge to bring a research idea into a product.   Sometimes the ideas aren't mature enough, sometimes the market isn't ready, sometime it is just too much work to make it enterprise ready, sometimes there's just too many priorities to juggle, but sometimes things just come together.

Years ago, I worked as a coop student in a research lab -- at the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) at Texas Instruments in Dallas.  We contributed some of the work we did to products (for example, I was involved with the introduction of the TI Explorer Lisp Machine), but a lot of the work we did was just interesting stuff that never really ended up in products.   Such is the nature of the beast.   But, of course, there are sometimes home runs.  Probably CSL's most widely known home run at the time was Speak & Spell -- a clever mix of technology and cool-ness.    

Looking today at the stuff coming out of IBM Research, you can bet (just playing the odds) that a lot of it is not going to be a home run and you'll likely never see it in a product.  

But, with Activity-centric computing, Dogear, and a host of other projects, I can just see the high fastball and the bat making solid contact...

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 10:10:00 PM | Add/View Comments (7)