How Watson Work Aims to Help Fulfill the Promise of Enterprise Collaboration
IBM’s new Watson Work Services and Watson Workspace initiatives set out to bring cognitive computing to collaboration solutions.
Last week in Las Vegas at IBM’s World of Watson conference, IBM announced a set of new offerings to enable the infusion of cognitive into collaboration solutions: Watson Work Services and Watson Workspace. Watson Work Services are a set of APIs developers can use to build Watson services into existing and new applications. One such application ready for integration is Watson Workspace. Workspace is a small team persistent chat application that can pull in conversations and actions from multiple channels and make sense of it all with the cognitive capabilities of Watson.
The 3 D’s of Disruption: Data, Decisions, & Distractions
Today’s workers are inundated with a constant barrage of disruptions. They are subject to an influx of data, decisions, and distractions that divvy up their work day and require them to break out of their flow to address. Watson Workspace looks to help keep workers in their flow by not only bringing a variety of information channels together but by also determining what’s important when. Workspace uses Watson’s natural language processing to identify actions and questions as well as summarizing conversations into bundles of related topics. This summarization and categorization can take the burden of having to watch chat channels, activity streams, and inboxes all day in fear of missing something off of the worker and allow them to catch up when it is convenient.
Redefining Work
The promise that enterprise social networks and collaboration platforms have set out for years to achieve is that they enable employees to more easily find the information and resources they need to do their jobs as effectively and efficiently as they can. And, ESNs do this. But, not for everyone equally. Studies show us that while many employees access internal social networks, fewer interact with the content they find, and fewer still actually produce and contribute content.
How do we change this? Enter Watson.
The goals of redefining everyday work with Watson aren’t that different than the typical goals we’ve had for years with ESNs and collaboration applications. What changes when cognitive computing is infused with these platforms and applications is hurdles are lowered and results are amplified. Smart applications guide and prompt users, aiding with adoption. The smarter the application, the more a worker can leverage the built-in capabilities, adapting their work to more efficient processes.
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If we can put a layer of intelligence on top of the apps that workers use, we can reduce their cognitive load toward the minor things and put it to use on what’s important. I don’t think, and I hope this is true, that we have even a glimpse in all the ways that cognitive computing and augmented intelligence are going to reshape our work in the future, but IBM has clarity around what they are offering today.
Personal Assistants & Expert Advisors
IBM sees their cognitive solutions having an impact today in the areas of providing access to expertise and personal assistants.
Personal assistants set out to help us prioritize work and handle the mundane tasks that permeate throughout our workday. Personal assistants help make actions we often take easier by understanding requests and offering up recommended actions. I am definitely looking forward to the point when a cognitive powered digital assistant can take over the time-consuming tasks of setting up meetings and asking for updates. Today, building in shortcuts to scheduling meetings when someone asks “can we meet tomorrow at 9:00 a.m.?” is a step in the right direction.
“Watson is creating the cognitive enterprise.”
— Ginni Rometty, CEO IBM
IBM sees Watson providing expert advisors to mean not only access to people experts but also to broader knowledge sources and analytics. Expert advisors, according to IBM, “understand our work, learn over time, and offer answers and insights.” This level of access to expertise goes well beyond having Google in your pocket everywhere you go. The vision here is for you to interact with Watson, perhaps through bots in a messaging based platform such as Watson Workspace, using natural language to ask questions and receive answers.
Enterprise Collaboration, the Cognitive Enterprise, and the Digital Workplace
Lots of companies are working on similar capabilities particularly in the AI space, but who else is doing this for your enterprise? IBM’s CEO, Ginni Rometty, said in her keynote address at World of Watson that “IBM is business” and that “Watson is THE platform for AI” and that “Watson is creating the cognitive enterprise.” Watson Work isn’t about more easily getting an Uber to take you to a meet up with your friends. Watson Work aims to make workers more productive through enhancing effectiveness by increasing intelligence.
This is the basis for what IBM GM of Collaboration Solutions, Inhi Cho Suh, envisions for the new age of collaboration tools. “With analytics, we get key insights from data, but with cognitive systems, we can turn those key insights into knowledge,” she told the audience as she introduced these new services. Turning insights into knowledge directly helps employees at their jobs. This concept says that we take something small and make it into something bigger, something lasting, and something that the entire enterprise can access and leverage.
The future of work is digital. So, we can’t amplify insights without using communication and collaboration technology. We must enable and embrace the digital workplace, but at the same time, we have to be cognizant that many of the advances we’ve seen over the last few years have made it hard to keep up with the amount of information coming at us.
This is why we need smarter tools that help keep employees at the top of their game and to meet the promises we’ve laid out with enterprise collaboration.
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