IT role model: People must be the centre of technology

At a recent mentoring event for young women interested in careers in technology, IBM Fellow Irene Greif received a surprise tribute: “I want to be you,” she was told.

Several weeks later, Dr Greif is still bemused by the experience. “No one has ever said anything like that to me before.” But the tribute was long overdue. Dr Greif is shy and modest, but her achievements are inspiring.

In 1975, she was the first woman to be awarded a doctorate in computer science by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is one of only a handful of women to have been made an IBM Fellow.

And, as the founder of the field of computer-supported co-operative work (CSCW), she has done much to influence how modern computing systems enable knowledge workers to collaborate.

It all began, she says, with her accountant mother, who encouraged her early aptitude for mathematics by getting her to add up columns of figures.

That led to a place at Hunter College High School for gifted children in New York and took Dr Greif on to MIT, where she majored in mathematics – supplemented that with a hefty dose of computer science classes – before getting her master’s degree and PhD in computer science.

After several years of juggling teaching and research at the University of Washington and back at MIT, she decided the balancing act did not work for her.

“To me, teaching and research seemed two different careers, and research was the one I enjoyed most,” she says. Her decision led to a collaboration inside MIT’s computer science laboratories with Dr Michael Hammer – the father of business process re-engineering – on the new field of CSCW.

“The difference between us and many of our computer science colleagues is that we cared not just about technology, but also about people and how they interact with it. That put us on the fringe of thinking at MIT at the time,” she recalls.

By the mid-1980s, Dr Greif’s attention had been caught by a small local start-up, Lotus Development, which was putting similar ideas into practice and developing them into software products for mainstream businesses.

She joined Lotus in 1987 and her personal contributions included early patented work on Version Manager, a feature that launched the group-enabling of all Lotus products.

When Lotus was acquired by IBM in 1995, Dr Greif stayed on, becoming an IBM Fellow in 1997 and leading IBM’s research on the collaborative user experience.

Last year, she was appointed director of IBM’s new Center for Social Software, a think-tank in which IBM researchers will build applications to enable the corporate world to tap into the kinds of collaborative activities seen on consumer-focused Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

“We’re well aware that, in many respects, IBM is way ahead of its customers in terms of the comfort level it feels about new social networking technologies.”

“But I believe that company representatives who visit us as corporate residents of the centre will go back to their organisations as committed evangelists,” she says.

Dr Greif’s work has attracted awards and honours: she is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and in 2000, she was inducted into the Women In Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame.

But although her IBM colleagues refer to her with the greatest respect and admiration, she remains resolutely humble: “I feel enormously grateful that ideas I’ve believed in passionately throughout my career continue to find relevance in a world where technology never stops evolving.”