Color cases ought to be printed in color to maximize their effectiveness. This case is set inside IBM Research's efforts to construct a computer that can take on human rivals playing the game show Jeopardy! It opens with the machine named Watson offering the incorrect answer "Toronto" to a seemingly straightforward question during the championship match. Was the reply a manifestation of a strategic weakness, or was it really consistent with design principles established by the development team? The case seeks to expand pupils' view of the product development process. Traditional software development projects start together with the gathering of requirements and evaluation of the problem, along with the writing of a comprehensive specification. The Jeopardy! problem is different - it requires a probabilistic strategy where there is no closed form solution. Instead statistical patterns in the data are significant and there is no obvious mapping to the manner queries are expressed.
Such difficulties are increasingly common in data mining, optimization problems, or Internet applications where the aim is to find an acceptably good alternative in a brief quantity of time, when a deterministic strategy might be impractical or less fruitful. We aspire for students to comprehend that product development can take many forms, and that these are enabled by creativity along with the right organizational flexibility and mindset. The case emphasizes the key function of performance metrics in assembling a flexible system which could be refined through experimentation and testing improving operation together with the incorporation of new algorithmic ideas and new data sources. This leaves students to judge the generality of its applicability and the strategy to business problems that are significant.
PUBLICATION DATE: September 06, 2011 PRODUCT #: 612017-HCC-ENG
This is just an excerpt. This case is about STRATEGY & EXECUTION
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