People typically only reflect on their time at a company and write about their experiences at the time that they announce that they’re leaving. That’s fine but I’d also like to continue a trend started by my wonderful friend and colleague Farzaneh Ghods of reflecting and writing about experiences with a company when you’ve decided to stay. Here’s my reflection on my time at IBM and why I’ve stayed and am staying.
The Path to IBM
Let’s start at the beginning. I never planned to work at IBM or get into design or the field of technology. I wanted to be a singer and musician when I was in high school. I studied classical music at the Royal Conservatory of Music, sang with the Bach Elgar Choir, played the lead in several musicals including Jesus in Gospel, and played in a number of rock and folk bands including working for several years as a professional musician in a house band playing every Saturday night. My high school music teacher advised me against taking music in university because he said most people with degrees in music end up teaching music and then they spend their life listening to bad music. So I took psychology as an undergraduate and in graduate school transitioned to clinical psychology and cognitive science. I was a student therapist at a correctional institute, a researcher at a psychiatric hospital, and ran a cognitive science research lab at the university. I also developed and taught several courses including research methods and statistics and also supervised undergraduate thesis students.
During my PhD program, all of my experiments investigating affective and cognitive processing of information were run on a computer as were the experiments in the research lab I ran. An interesting thing happened when I advertised to the university campus for a research assistant to help run the experiments. Even though there were many applicants, all were male students. I thought that was strange given that the student body was largely made up of women. Being a researcher, I wanted to find out why. It turned out that it was the fact that the job required working with a computer. This was in the late 1980s and it’s not like there weren’t any computers. It appeared that there may be a gender difference in feeling comfortable using computers. I created the Computer Anxiety Scale (CAS), a standardized survey instrument that several hundred male and female students then completed. The results confirmed that college women were significantly more anxious in using computers than their male counterparts. Then I investigated why that was the case and looked at computer use in elementary school and a content analysis of computer advertising both of which revealed sources of the gender difference. Boys would physically push girls away so that they could maneuver themselves into position to use classroom computers and the computer advertising had almost exclusively male actors and used male pronouns. So then I thought, how can I improve this situation.
That’s what inspired me to get into design. I immersed myself in the study and practice of design. I analyzed the design of software at the time and noticed that it wasn’t very intuitive or usable and it actually was a pretty negative experience. That is, quite literally negative because much of what you did on the user interface would generate an unpleasant sound and an error message saying that you did something wrong and often nothing about how you could fix it. In fact, there was very little in the way of positive experiences in working with most software. So, I designed two different user interfaces, one with the usual elements characteristic of typical software at the time, and one that was more intuitive and usable that gave positive feedback and no negative feedback. I then tested the two user interfaces with computer anxious women (who scored high on my CAS questionnaire) and non-computer anxious women (who scored low on my questionnaire). I measured self-report, galvanic skin response, and heart rate. The results were outstanding. My new design led to results that made the computer anxious women indistinguishable in terms of self-report, galvanic skin response, and heart rate from the non-computer anxious women. The non-computer anxious women preferred it too.
I presented the results of all of that work at a scientific conference shortly after that and not only did it generate a buzz in the scientific community, I was also interviewed by the press. Several people at IBM learned of my work through those press interviews and gave me a call asking, “have you ever considered working for IBM?” I answered honestly saying that I hadn’t ever considered working for IBM, I was planning to be a clinician, and an academic. However, I mentioned that I had read a book about the founders of IBM which impressed me with their vision, innovation, and mostly their values. That led to an interview in a facility that was far more impressive than my lab at the university in terms of the design of the space and the equipment. And when we talked salary, I said to myself that I would give it a go for a year.
The Early Years
It turns out that I was hired by the Vice President of Research and Development, Bill McClean, to amp up design practices at the Canadian development Lab because the global company was planning to break up and the Lab I was hired into would have to survive and hopefully thrive on its own. As an independent software company, it would have to dramatically improve the design of its products. That VP of R&D didn’t tell anyone else though about the reason he hired me. I therefore spent some time doing things the way they were done for the first couple of years. That included practices like human factors engineering, usability testing, and generally learning what was wrong with a product too late in the cycle to do anything about it.
The User-Centered Design Years
When things finally got serious about starting to change the design practices in the early 1990s, the Director of the Lab, John Schwartz, asked me to develop a new approach to designing products and lead a few others to come up with a new product development process. I was given six designers, a budget, and six months to come up with the new design and research approach. I read the existing literature and came across a book by Don Norman on User-Centered Systems Design. I loved it. It was exactly what I needed so I made that the foundation of our approach. My team and I also combed the literature and met with other leading companies in the industry to share best practices. I also wanted to ensure that our practices would be business focused so I added methods like competitive evaluation and measurements like intent to purchase. We took this so seriously that we would recruit the decision maker as well as the user and have them answer as one in our evaluation sessions. We needed to do that because with enterprise software, purchase decisions aren’t made by the user themselves. We would also recruit users of our competitors’ products in order to try to design our products to satisfy them. I called the new approach to design IBM User-Centered Design (IBM UCD). After developing it, we tested it with a handful of product teams.
Even though I still had a couple of months to go in my allotted six month project, the interim results were so positive that the head of IBM’s global software group, Steve Mills, asked to have me fly to Armonk, New York to present my new approach to the A-Team, his senior executives and himself. That meeting went really well and led to the inclusion of my IBM UCD in the company’s integrated development process.
After our Software Group adopted IBM UCD for a couple of years, IBM’s CEO Lou Gerstner, also became a fan. In fact, he asked, “what do teams do without IBM UCD, do the engineers just make up what the product should be and how it should be designed?” The answer was sadly, “yes”. That led to IBM UCD being adopted as the approach to design for all business units of the company. In 1995 IBM UCD went company-wide.
To activate the entire company with our new approach, I traveled the globe to do presentations to our labs, ran what we would now call bootcamps, three days in duration for product teams and one day for executives. I also had monthly conference calls with the company’s designers and separate calls with the managers and we also held a yearly conference.
We had significant success with IBM UCD in that it helped the IBM Thinkpad go from eighth in customer satisfaction to first. We also used IBM UCD to design the software and systems for the Olympics and several of IBM’s software products.
To inspire more adoption by additional business units in 1997, I came up IBM UCD Lite, which added a set of tools to make the carrying out of the work more efficient and effective. The tools included a database application which provided designers the ability to select from 10,000 users who were prescreened and willing to be in user research studies, a tool for understanding, visualizing, and analyzing user tasks, a tool for conducting complex surveys for our designers to use and another with preset questions to choose from for non-designers to use, a tool for users to let us know about positive or negative experiences that they had in real time which would also with their permission send us two minutes of screen activity immediately prior to the event, tools for logging events tagged to video recordings of user studies, and even tools for making designs accessible including showing how designs would appear to users with different types of color blindness.
I had a direct team of about thirty designers and developers that were almost entirely funded from each of the business units of the company whom I would reach out to annually at Fall Plan time to show the value my team provided to them the previous year and to specify based on their number of designers and the use that was made of the tools the portion of my budget they would have to contribute. It was at times nerve racking running what in essence was an internal startup and having to make the case for funding based on the value we provided and yet having thirty employees and their families dependent on my success at tin-cupping around the company. I was so pleased that business units were sufficiently satisfied by my team’s work that my budget would increase typically about ten percent each year.
I authored a book together with a couple of my colleagues to share everything we’d developed entitled “User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach”. I also served as the special issue editor of an entire issue of the IBM Systems Journal describing our work and I also put together a special double-issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. I ran workshops teaching IBM UCD at each of the major industry design conferences as well for several years.
During this period I reported to IBM Vice President and IBM Fellow Tony Temple. I led the process and approach teams should use, IBM UCD, and the rest of Tony’s organization focused on innovative user interface technologies. We also had an internal Ease of Use Consultancy team which I was on which met for a week at an IBM lab somewhere in the world and we would review product designs from that lab and provide recommendations and guidance for how the designs could be improved. We also briefly toyed with an approach that was called User Engineering but it wasn’t as effective as IBM UCD was.
The Early IBM Design Years
Prior to this, I used the term IBM User Experience Design for our organization but in 2008 I introduced the term “IBM Design” and didn’t preface design with anything else. We also did work to specify sub-disciplines like visual design, interaction design, user research, and a total user experience leader. We updated our website with the new name and created the IBM Design social media handles we still use today.
During this period I reported to IBM Vice President and IBM Fellow Rod Smith who had responsibility for incubating, developing, and introducing entirely new technologies and product types into the company. One of those technologies was Artificial Intelligence or AI. IBM’s research division had built an AI system designed to beat humans in the TV game show called Jeopardy. And IBM Watson did just that in 2011. Rod asked me to head up design and research for a new product version of IBM Watson. I was asked how many designers and researchers I would need and I said six to begin with. I was told to go find the best six in the company.
In addition to continuing to lead the company’s 230 strong community of designers and design managers, I also led the product design work on IBM Watson. We had a startup mentality. The executive team decided to focus the first product on healthcare in general and on Oncology in particular. What did we do first? User Research of course. A couple of researchers and I visited cancer clinics doing ethnographic observation and structured interviews. We reflected on what we had learned and on how AI could help the staff and the Oncologists in diagnosing and treating their patients. We then designed paper and pencil prototypes of possible solutions and carried out user studies to gather feedback on those prototypes. We then built higher fidelity prototypes and those generated huge interest because they were the first examples of using AI in these ways. Those prototypes were shared with the entire senior executive team of the company, with IBM’s investors, and with the press. The designs were implemented in the first versions of the product and early results showed that cancer patients could get treatment weeks and months sooner when Oncologists used the product. It was one of the most gratifying projects to work on given our purpose of saving lives.
The Phil Gilbert Years
In 2012, IBM announced a new CEO in the person of Ginni Rometty. I was in a meeting with Ginni on her second day on the job. She started off her talk by saying that the client experience would be the most important strategic area of focus during her leadership. I was delighted. And I knew that the group of design managers that I led across the company should provide some input to her to realize her vision. We pulled together the best practices that we saw inside the company which had Phil’s organization’s Design Thinking in the top spot. Design Thinking is built on the User-Centered Design practices we knew and loved but it also added incredibly powerful collaborative mapping and ideating methods. We also determined that we would have to hire a lot more designers and researchers given her focus. I put a presentation together recommending the practices and staffing and together with fellow executive Sal Vella presented it on a conference call to Robert LeBlanc, our Senior Vice President. He asked me to gather some more data on the current population. I collected that information—most importantly that we had 230 designers and researchers with most of them assigned to more than one product and on average three products. I thought it was so important to get this information to Robert that I flew to New York on my own dime to share it with him in person. He was shocked at how few designers and researchers we had and even more so the fact that they were typically working on more than one product. Given the recommendation from our previous presentation coupled with these cold hard facts about our design and research population, he immediately contacted Ginni. Robert also had conversations in parallel with Phil and then more between Robert, Phil, and Ginni. After that, Ginni had a call with Phil and asked him whether he could achieve what he accomplished with his company and the business unit he was hired into with design thinking and to do it for all of IBM. Phil answered “I don’t know but I’m willing to try”. Phil was then asked to take on the role of General Manager of Design for IBM. In one of the first conversations I had with Phil, he said that he wanted me to work 100 percent on the design transformation of the company and that I shouldn’t have product design responsibility. I then reluctantly gave up my design leadership role on IBM Watson and didn’t have much to do with the project anymore after that.
I outline in detail what we did during the Phil Gilbert years in my blogpost “A Personal Tribute and Thanks to Phil Gilbert”.
The Katrina Alcorn Years Months
When Phil announced that he was stepping down as GM of Design, he also announced his successor. It was Katrina Alcorn. Phil couldn’t have chosen a more perfect successor. And that’s so Phil.
Of course, Katrina’s era of IBM Design is only a few months old at this point but it’s been absolutely awesome working with her. Phil was a startup guy who was audacious enough to make the case for and build out a 3,000 designer community, our Enterprise Design Thinking transformation, and our almost 100 design studios around the world. Phil laid the foundation. Katrina is a designer. And she takes a designer’s approach, which is perfectly in line with my approach to things. We think alike.
Katrina has worked very closely with a hand full of colleagues and me on the Next Chapter of IBM Design. I’ve helped her run roundtable workshops with small groups of our design leaders, conduct surveys of not only our 3,000 person design organization but also of design adjacent disciplines like product management, development, partners, and sales. She’s written several blogposts as we constructed the elements of the Next Chapter to gather input and additional ideas. To optimize the listening, she published the blogposts out in the open internally and externally in our IBM Design Medium publication and held Ask Me Anything sessions (AMAs) inside the company.
What I’m doing now
My current responsibilities include heading up the Design Executive Team (DET) which is made up of the most senior managerial design executives from each business unit of the company. I established the DET as a body of leaders to govern and lead the company’s 3,000 designers. I’m perhaps connected more with all of the company than any other design executive so I notice when we need to explore an opportunity or address a problem. DET members also propose these themselves. I then form workgroups to address the opportunities/challenges by asking each of the DET members to assign members of their business unit design organizations to the workgroups. The teams I lead like the DET are ones where we truly work as One IBM. Another such team is the Design Leadership Board (DLB) which reviews and appoints our Design Principals, Distinguished Designers, and IBM Fellows, the highest technical positions in IBM’s design career framework. A related role involves being responsible for the design profession and our design career framework. I gladly took on these roles and now work with amazing team member Lauren Swanson on those programs. At the beginning of this year, Phil asked me to take on some additional responsibilities including design culture across the company including our focus on racial equity, our external social media presence, and our external engagement. I absolutely love those additional areas of responsibility and thank Phil for them. I also now get to work with the awesome Renee Albert on these additional responsibilities. That work has resulted in programs like our Design Mavens Power Hour video and podcast series which has been internal to the company thus far but will soon be available externally as well and our collaboration with the America by Design TV show with whom we’ve produced six episodes of Season 1 and we’re working on Season 2 as I write this.
What I love about IBM?
Like many successful and highly visible design executives, I’ve been approached by headhunters and company executives trying to recruit me for Vice President or General Manager positions at other large and well-known companies. While the offers are tempting and flattering, I’m not, nor have I ever been, much into titles and prestige nor am I looking for additional challenges. IBM continues to be a big enough challenge. I’m a servant leader that just wants to get things done in collaboration with colleagues and my mission of making IBM insanely successful with design hasn’t been accomplished yet. So, I’ll be staying.
I also just love the opportunities that IBM has and continues to provide me, the values and culture the company espouses and encourages, and what the company does for the world. These include the following.
I’ve been given free range and empowered to come up with entirely new programs and to work on projects of my own choosing. These include:
Developing IBM UCD for the company and having the freedom to found an internal startup to enable it with outreach, education, and innovative tools.
Having had the opportunity to lead design globally for IBM’s object oriented computer-aided software engineering initiative called AD/Cycle.
Representing IBM on various standards bodies and having the opportunity to co-write several design standards including the International Standards Organization (ISO) Human Centred Design Processes for Interactive Systems 13407.
Overseeing the development and evolution of IBM’s first executive dashboard to track key design and quality related metrics.
Building a design team and leading design for the brand new technology of AI with the IBM Watson product and working with the most senior executives of the company, the company’s leading investors, and the press.
Leading the design and development of IBM’s first design system and toolkit, IBM One UI. It had a set of design patterns, a design language, and implemented in an open source toolkit that was the most accessible and global at the time. This work was the predecessor of IBM’s current Carbon design system.
Designing and then executing on approaches to organizational transformation of each of the business units of IBM (product, consulting, and sales) and with numerous other enterprise and startup companies and organizations.
Working with every part of IBM, traveling around the world several times to IBM locations and working with local teams, and working with hundreds of IBM clients and prospective clients often with their c-suite or other senior executives.
Reaching out to the heads of the World Design Organization and Design for America and together forming and leading the Covid 19 Design Challenge.
Creating the IBM Global Academic Programs for Design and working with the top design schools, universities, and HBCUs around the world.
Founding the Future of Design Education initiative with Don Norman and co-leading it with him and Meredith Davis and forming a volunteer team of IBM designers to help with the initiative.
Being invited to give keynotes at conferences, being asked to be on industry panels, serving as a judge for design competitions and hackathons, and being asked to be a mentor to so many people.
The support I’ve had in advocating for plant-based whole food vegan options in the cafeteria at the Canadian Lab where I’m based and for agreeing to provide vegan options at our major global events including the client executive workshops that I’ve led over the years.
Having been able to pursue my first passions in music, clinical psychology, and academia while at IBM. I’ve formed bands and sang in choirs at IBM, converted my inside IBM mentoring into a highly popular Life Habits Mentoring podcast hosted on all the major platforms for more than ten years with more than 100 episodes, and having been recruited to serve as an Industry Professor at the Degroote Schools of Business and Medicine at McMaster University after a press interview where I was quoted as saying that our IBM bootcamp program was the “missing semester” of university. I’ve been teaching that missing semester ever since.
It was the values and beliefs of the IBM founders in that book I read those many years ago that initially inspired me to join IBM and in my experience they continue to inspire and support me in my work. Beliefs like respect for the individual, a culture of innovation, a service mindset, a supportive management culture, trust and responsibility, fairness, and being a good corporate citizen.
I’ve always had managers who respected and supported me, who allowed me to pursue my interests and to use and hone my skills, who considered me an equal in collaborating with me, and who supported a healthy work-life balance.
The type of person IBM hires has always impressed me including the people I’ve hired. A focus on skills and talent but also on collaboration, communication, and caring. I can honestly say that I thoroughly enjoy my daily interactions with my staff, my colleagues, my bosses, and our clients. You spend a lot of hours at work and why not spend them with people you enjoy spending time with. I’ve also been impressed by the diversity of my colleagues whether gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, race, ethnicity, and the fact that I work with people from all around the world.
I started my career in Canada and even though I’ve had a global role since 1995, I love that I still have responsibility for the IBM Canada design studios and get to work with Gord Davison and the Canadian managers and designers. They also give me the opportunity to stay grounded and to try new things and prototype ideas in one region of the world before introducing them worldwide.
IBM has a set of business conduct guidelines that every employee has to study and certify every year. And those guidelines evolve with the times. Those guidelines and seeing evidence on a regular basis that they’re being followed is so heartening. It makes me proud to call myself an IBMer.
IBM has been on the forefront of diversity and inclusion for many years. The company hired its first Black employees in 1911 and its Equal Opportunity Policy came out 11 years before the US Civil Rights Act. IBM hired its first employee with a disability 59 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act. The company hired its first woman vice president in 1942, the first woman to be appointed to such a position in any company in the USA. And the list goes on. No company is perfect and nor of course is IBM but IBM’s values, beliefs, and culture keep us maniacally focused on trying to be better all the time.
When George Floyd was murdered last year, Phil Gilbert, my boss and General Manager of Design, arranged a town hall on the topic of race which subsequently launched a major initiative called Racial Equity in Design that has led to significantly greater hiring of Black designers, the creation of a field guide for managers and leaders, the co-hosting of a history of Black design conference, the teaching of a class on decolonized design, communicating the work and inspiring young Black students to get into design and founding an Empower Award to organizations doing exemplary work in the area of diversity and design on the America by Design TV show, and much more. This work was led by my friend and colleague, Nigel Prentice, his second in command Jessica Tremblay, and an awesome team of Black designers which Nigel calls first pillar and a team of non-Black designers, like me, who Nigel calls second pillar. You need both pillars to be the foundation for effecting real change. What’s most heartening is that I’m seeing real change happening in the company and beyond due to this amazing work.
A 110 year old company has to keep focused on ensuring that it is a company for existing employees but also for younger new hires as well. I was fortunate to become involved with an initiative that’s now called Innovation Corps which was designed to help re-design the company for and with the help of the next generation of employees. I’m responsible for the Canadian arm of this initiative and love working with my partner who represents that next generation, Farzaneh Ghods. We’ve workshopped, run surveys, and formed a team of next generation employees and together made a real difference in the way the company operates.
I continue to be impressed by how important IBM is to the world, how it continues to invent and innovate, and what it stand for.
Most of the world’s business is done on IBM systems, with 87% of all credit card transactions being handled for example. I believe our purpose with IBM Design is to make people’s work life more enjoyable and productive given how much of our lives we spend at work and so that those workers could finish their day a little earlier and with greater satisfaction.
IBM organized the High-Performance Computing Consortium to put the fastest computers in the world at the disposal of scientists working on Covid 19.
Concerned about the use of facial recognition software by law enforcement, IBM abandoned its work on the technology.
Its Tech for Good programs are addressing everything from climate change to food safety to disrupting human trafficking.
IBM has been granted the most patents of any other company in the world for 29 years running. Inventions that you may not know came from IBM include the Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code, the Automated Teller Machine (ATM), Lasik laser eye surgery and five IBMers have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
I think it’s impressive too that IBM has a decades old policy of not making political donations.
I’ve been so pleased with IBM’s response to the pandemic with 95 percent of the company’s employees able to work from home within a week or two and the level of empathy and caring exhibited by leaders as we progress through this lengthy period of disruption.
I could go on but I won’t largely because I have more experiences to have and more chapters to write as I continue my journey with IBM. I’ve always been proud to say that I’m an IBMer and I look forward to many more years of saying that.