This article was published online at Baseline Magazine on May 3, 2011.
IBM’s Jeopardy-playing Watson computer has been hailed as a technology triumph – the ability of computers to understand human language and broad knowledge topics – not just facts and trivia but ambiguous language including puns, double entendre’s and idioms.
The technology is impressive and IBM has set its sights on many commercial applications in healthcare, financial services and customer service operations. Few organizations have the resources it took to build Watson - $3mm worth of hardware (off the shelf servers with almost 3000 processors and 1 terabyte of RAM) – not to mention millions in research. Nevertheless, the question remains, does Watson embed a solution approach that enterprises can exploit or learn from? How readily can a “Watson” be applied to the knowledge and content access problems of the typical enterprise?
A few clues lie in the nature of knowledge access and in some of the challenges that Watson team members discussed in articles and interviews. First, here are some principles that Watson exploited:
