March/April 2010
Turning Math into Cash
IBM has found a new source of revenue: using its mathematicians' formulas in business services.
By William M. Bulkeley
Five years ago, Brenda Dietrich started to investigate how IBM's 40,000 salespeople could learn to rely a little more on math than on their gut instincts. In particular, Dietrich, who heads the company's 200-person worldwide team of math researchers, was asked to see if math could help managers do a better job of setting sales quotas. She assigned three mathematicians at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, to work on new techniques for predicting how much business the company could get from a given customer.
| Subscribe to the Technology Review Magazine
To view this article, you must have a paid subscription to Technology Review (print or digital edition) OR you can purchase credits to view individual articles. We have several options for content access:
Technology Review does more than tell you about what you can expect to see next. We explain it to you, in graphic, riveting detail. If it’s relevant to technology and the future, you’ll learn about it first in Technology Review. Well before the mainstream press wakes up to a technology breakthrough, Technology Review will have made it available to you. But we don’t just report—we analyze. You get in-depth coverage that’s authoritative, reliable, and universally respected.
|
|
|
Massachusetts Institute of Technology