The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com

solutions. Even research is highly competitive; people hoard their study until it’s
published – or keep things back altogether. We have a system that encourages holding
onto data rather than collaboration. Now I’ve learned how important policy is.
Health care is so fragmented – and broken – that no one player can fix it by itself.”
But mostly, she says, “The challenge is how far we have to go as individual consumers
of health care. Consumers have the power to transform the health system and their
own situation – if they only used that power.”
Caroline Kovac, IBM: Tough love for health care
“If even a low-margin, highly competitive industry such as retailing can afford highly
sophisticated technology, why can’t health care? People say that doctors can’t figure
out how to use technology....How come the clerks at Wal-Mart can learn to use
technology, but highly educated doctors cannot?” asks Carol Kovac somewhat
rhetorically. Of course, the Wal-Mart clerks have no choice. . .but pretty soon the
doctors may have little choice either. Kovac lists ways the world is changing: The
baby boom generation is moving into its health-conscious years. Normal people are
adopting the Web for day-to-day tasks that will ultimately include health care.
“People ask,‘But how can we pay for it?’ Most businesses figure out how to use technology;
they assess the return on investment, and they figure it out,” she answers herself.“In
other words, we’re not talking about spending so much as about investment.”
Now general manager of IBM healthcare and life sciences, Kovac began her career as
a chemist at IBM Research, working on challenges such as the ion-transfer behavior
of semiconductor materials. “The delightful thing about IBM Research is that you
could really do interdisciplinary work. Universities are still very siloed. At IBM
Research you get this rich ferment of engineers of all stripes, chemists, physicists,
biologists. . .I hired our first economist back in the early days of the Web to do
experimental economics and game theory about people’s online behavior.”
Over the years she broadened her brief to managing scientists, and in the early ‘90s
she moved out of research to apply scientific optimization techniques to IBM’s supply-chain
management business. She returned a few years later to IBM Research to
run strategy. In 2001, on the principle of lying in the bed you make, she followed the
strategic opportunity she saw in the life sciences: She launched IBM’s life sciences
“emerging business opportunity.” (To gauge what that means, consider this: Another
EBO at IBM is China. The idea is basically a large-scale start-up within IBM.) The
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