Faster Company

Harper was no stranger to fast-track projects, either. Back in mid-1994, Harper had helped John Patrick, IBM's VP of Internet technology, to build IBM.com, the company's first Web site. She had also been a key player in developing IBM's Web sites for high-profile events, such as Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, and the chess matches between Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov. Now, among her other responsibilities, Harper runs the 20-person WebAhead lab, in Southbury, Connecticut, which prototypes new technologies.

The WebAhead lab is itself a prototype for how IBM teams can work together efficiently, seamlessly, and quickly. The Speed Team mined the lab's culture for a number of its major insights. WebAhead employees work in a single shared-office setup, not unlike that of a high-school computer lab -- long tables of several employees arranged in rows. The overall atmosphere is informal, even messy. A sign on the door reads, "This is not your father's IBM." The lab's purpose is simple and liberating: "Our team is funded to do cool stuff for IBM," says Bill Sweeney, 42, a WebAhead manager. "We don't have to think about increasing sales of a product line. We just have to think about the next important thing that might hit us."

In December 1997, the WebAhead group was first to explore how IBM could benefit from instant messaging, a technology more commonly associated with teenagers zapping one another from all over the world than with business. Last year, WebAhead began distributing an instant-messaging client to IBM employees, and before long, 200,000 employees -- including CIO Ward -- had adopted it as a way to get quick answers from colleagues. "People think nothing of messaging me," says Ward. "That technology lets me reach down several levels in the company, and it lets others reach up. It's an important tool that allows me to sniff out a problem quickly."

All members of WebAhead are passionate about their pet projects, whether it's IBM systems infrastructure specialist Judy Warren talking about a new wireless-networking setup for the lab or Konrad Lagarde explaining how he and some colleagues are devising a way for employees to use their cell-phones to access the IBM intranet. Lagarde shows off a Sprint PCS phone that can find an employee's phone number, determine that person's location, and then send an instant message, electronically or by phone. He says that voice recognition using IBM's own ViaVoice technology is the next step.

How long did it take Lagarde and his coworkers to put together the system that translated Web data into phone data? "Maybe a day or two," he replies. "And we went to lunch both days." Other group members have created animated characters that walk around a Web page, directing users to relevant content (total development time for each character: three hours) and a project called the Video Watercooler, which, when completed, will link WebAhead staffers in Southbury, Connecticut to colleagues in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Somers, New York; and Evanston, Illinois. Instead of forcing users to schedule times for formal videoconferences, the Watercooler will encourage more frequent, informal interactions among employees -- brainstorming or simply talking about what they're working on.

But even people who always drive in the passing lane occasionally hit a speed bump. In late January, that's what happened to the Video Watercooler project: The servers required to process the hefty stream of incoming and outgoing data hadn't arrived yet. "It's embarrassing, but hardware is sometimes a constraint," Harper says. "We're waiting for boxes." Customer needs take precedence over internal requests. After a moment, Harper adds, "We're making lots of phone calls." But she doesn't sound happy about the situation.

Through her work with the WebAhead group, Harper had already unlocked several of the secrets to speed. One such secret: Speed is its own reward. Employees were encouraged and energized when they saw their pet projects being deployed in a matter of weeks, rather than months or quarters. Harper made sure that those pet projects were pertinent to the company by issuing a clear mission that itself focused on speed: "We're interested in things that help people collaborate faster, message faster, and make decisions faster."

Harper learned something else from the WebAhead experience: Companies don't move faster; people do. And not all people, whatever their technical credentials, are cut out to move at the speed that's necessary to keep pace with Internet time. Which is why Harper is serious about turbocharging the recruiting process for all of IBM's leading-edge Internet groups, which include alphaWorks, Next Generation Internet, and WebAhead. Last summer, she helped start IBM's Extreme Blue internship program for software engineers in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This year, Harper will expand that program to a second location: Stanford University's campus, in Palo Alto, California. There, interns will live together MTV Real World-style in a fraternity house while working on high-profile projects.

Extreme Blue helps IBM reach the most fleet-footed engineers before Internet startups do. After last summer's pilot in Cambridge, the program is already starting to feed the ranks. By late January, WebAhead had offered jobs to five Extreme Blue participants; several other promising interns had decided to stay in college for an extra year to get their master's degree. "We get them during holidays and vacations, though," Harper says.