How to SMASH Your Strategy

Introspective computing conjures up an image of a computer that might have to take time out for yoga in order to figure out how to solve a problem. Introspective computing is also a bit too meditative; most people want decisive computing.

IBM's original phrase behind SMASH -- simple, many, self-healing -- has an appealingly democratic and holistic feeling. But as IBM has increased its focus on the ideas, it has moved beyond the acronym "SMASH" in favor of the phrase "autonomic computing." "The more we thought about it," says Pulleyblank, "smash is what you do to an egg. The idea of an autonomic system is a broad concept with a meaning of its own."

The unspoken rivalry over terminology, though, masks a much wider, even surprising, consensus on the goals of autonomic computing. This is the moment when computer science shifts from focusing relentlessly on performance -- How fast is the processor? How big is the hard drive? -- to focusing on stability and reliability. The way IBM's research organization was plunged into autonomic computing is indicative of both why and how the world of computer science is changing.

Paul Horn, a physicist by training, came to IBM from the University of Chicago two decades ago. After Horn took over as head of research for IBM in 1996, he did an assessment of how the R&D group was supporting the rest of IBM. By the late 1990s, about half of IBM's revenue, profit, and employees were in the company's global-services division, providing computing services and support to other companies, not simply selling them hardware and software. Of the R&D group's $5 billion budget, Horn asked, how much is devoted to supporting global services? "Zippo," says Horn. The scientist had a distinctly businessmanlike moment: "I said, 'If we can't provide anything to support global services -- half the company, more than half the employees -- maybe we ought to be half the size we are.' "

It's remarkable how quickly you get people to focus when you suggest cutting the budget in half. "For us, it was Business Survival 101," says Horn. He also quickly discovered that throughout R&D there were people like Donna Dillenberger who were working on projects relevant to global services.

Horn also discovered that global services had problems that R&D might be able to tackle. Customers think that information technology is too expensive to manage, too cumbersome, and too flaky, especially given how important it's become. And those things are as true for IBM's own global-services group as they are for IBM's more traditional customers.

"The question is, How do you provide services cheaply?" says Horn. "How do you grow the business without exploding the number of people? What we really need are systems to take the people out. We were being hit by the very complexity that we created and the difficulty in managing that complexity. What we needed were systems to manage it."

The results -- even in early testing of IBM products not due until September -- have been impressive. At one company, says Dillenberger, autonomic workload-management software is handling chores previously done by systems administrators. The server room has just one person in it. "It used to have 20 people," she says. "And the computers are working consistently better than they used to. The room is quiet. And those 19 people have moved on to manage other things."

One of IBM's early products is what Dillenberger calls a "visualization tool," a program that analyzes data and illustrates how systems are performing. "We were working with a telecom company," she says, "and while we were there, they had a problem with the remote handhelds used by their field-service employees." The field technicians got their work orders sent remotely to their handhelds. For three days, that wireless link functioned improperly; techs weren't getting their assignments.

"They were losing money, their customers weren't getting service, and it escalated to a critical situation," says Dillenberger. "They had people from four different IT departments -- network, workstations, applications, and remote systems -- working on it." But they weren't making much headway. Dillenberger's group used the new software to tackle the problem. "With the way it discards irrelevant data, it was able to pinpoint the problem in seconds, instead of in days," she says. The reaction of the systems people at the telecom company? "They want it right away," says Dillenberger. "They don't want to wait until September."

In other words, they want to eliminate the gap between strategy and implementation.

Charles Fishman (cnfish@mindspring.com) is a senior editor based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Learn more about SMASH and autonomic computing on the Web (www.research.ibm.com/autonomic).