Posted by
Steve Hamm in
“The point of cities is multiplicity of choice,” said Jane Jacobs, the champion of cities who penned the breakthrough 1961 critique of urban renewal, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. We think it’s a good idea to give a multiplicity of people who are interested in the future of cities opportunities to learn about it and do something about it. That’s why we’re conducting a virtual Smarter Cities event on Feb. 23 (10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., Eastern U.S. Time) as we mentioned here on this blog a few days ago.
This Smarter Cities phenomenon is really taking off. We’ve held major terrestrial events in Berlin and New York, and plan another in Shanghai this summer. We’ve also staged dozens of mini-events in cities throughout the world. So going online is an obvious next step. Anybody who wants to participate is welcome. Register on ibm.com.
The event will start off with a handful of speeches delivered by government and business leaders who are up to their elbows in making cities work better. They include Bev Perdue, governor of North Carolina, and Joseph Rigby, chairman of utility giant Pepco Holdings. Our own Bridget van Kralingen, IBM general manager, North America, will launch the event with an update on our Smarter Planet initiative. (One tidbit: A little more than a year after launching the initiative, we have 1200 partnerships with clients worldwide–a faster uptake than we expected.) Gov. Purdue will talk about a test project in Charlotte aimed at revolutionizing the way highways are built. Using a public-private partnership model, North Carolina is teaming up with developers who will not only perform the design and construction of the new highway sections, but will invest some of their own money, as well. If this approach works in Charlotte, Perdue plans on rolling it out across the state.
After a lunch break (you’re on your own for that), there will be breakout sessions focusing on education, public safety, transportation, government, energy, and healthcare. As somebody who attended university in Pittsburgh, I’m particularly interested in hearing from Dr. Daniel Martich, the chief medical information officer at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. UPMC is reinventing itself as a laboratory for innovations in healthcare technology and new approaches to delivering care.
For participants, there will be plenty of opportunities to weigh in. There will be a question-and-answer session after the major addresses and interactive discussions during each breakout panel. Participants will type their comments and questions on their computers.
Who knows, maybe the next Jane Jacobs will emerge out of one of these events. The pool of brainpower is certainly getting big enough to make that possible.
Posted by
Jack Mason in
On Wednesday, June 24 IBM hosted a forum in Washington, D.C. on Capitol Hill (Video: http://bit.ly/sxJMZ ) for our clients and influencer ecosystem to examine the need for smarter and safer food systems, and to discuss the future of food safety and quality and ways to improve consumer safety and confidence. More than 70 people attended including a US Congresswoman, US Federal Food Agencies, clients, academia, business partners, grocery and food associations, White House staffers, press and analysts. Organizations represented include the FDA, Center for Food Safety, United Fresh Produce Association, USDA, Wisconsin Livestock Identification Association, Univ of Maryland, George Mason Univ, Sara Lee, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and attendees were very complimentary of (and in some cases surprised) at the diversity of participants.
Here are a few highlights from each speaker – common themes include the need for identifiers for food products, open traceability systems, standards, and information sharing:
Congresswoman Nita Lowey, NY-18 (Westchester): we need a mandatory traceability system for all foods
David Acheson, Assoc. Commisioner for Food, FDA: major roadblocks to food safety are the lack of uniform standards, we need a global traceability system, there’s a misconception that local is safe and global is unsafe
Gay Whitney, Standards Director, EPCglobal: we need standards for food identification, information capture and information sharing
Caroline Smith DeWaal, Food Safety Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest: 46% consumers worry they’ll get sick from food, 52% have little confidence in food safety systems, retailers need to take more responsibility with recalls
Viktor Varan, Matiq: talked about the food tracking system implemented in Norway
Dr. Allan Preston, DVM and Assistant Deputy Minister, Manitoba Agriculture, Food & Rural Initiatives: humbled by how underdeveloped and developing nations are ahead of North America in food traceability
Dr. Harold Schmitz, Chief Science Officer, Mars: We need government, universities, and the industry to work together, and not fragment, to counter food supply chain threats
Margaret Saunders, Homeland Security Director, Oak Ridge National Lab: food safety is important to homeland security
The session ended with an active Q&A that could have gone longer, but we were already over our allotted time.
Below is a link to the press kit for the event that includes the final press release on the consumer survey we did about their attitudes on food safety that we released the day of the event. as well as other relevant content.
www.ibm.com/press/smarterfood
To build on the Smarter Cities event in Berlin, we wanted to share this video-on-demand section on the new IBM Global Business Services Video Studio, which includes a variety of clips and short videos related to Smarter Cities. The Studio was launched in conjunction with the new GBS consulting organization, Business Analytics & Optimization Services.
Of course, you are also welcome to follow Smarter Cities news and development via the Smarter Cities Widget, or via the Smarter Cities channel on Tumblr.
More of a :60 second primer than an ad, this new video hits home on the new intelligence aspect of IBM’s new consulting service, business analytics. For more on this see the Smarter Enterprise channel on our Smarter Planet site on Tumblr. Continue Reading »
Business Decision Optimization. Evidence-Based Management. The Realtime, Predictive Enterprise.
On April 14, IBM launched Business Analytics & Optimization Services, a major expansion of its consulting organization that embraces all of these fronts. The move not only signals how the smarter planet vision is transforming into new value for IBM clients, but how that worldview will help individual organizations actually become more intelligent.
Business analytics may sound like an abstraction – (analytics simply means the science of analysis) – but it reflects a very tangible reality at the heart of Smarter Planet: because we can increasingly sense and gather information with unprecedented scale and precision, entire new spheres of knowledge and insight are within reach. We can measure and monitor just about anything, from the complex interactions in natural systems like Galway Bay to the ebb and flow of power over an intelligent electric grid.
As the new paper from IBM’s Institute of Business Value, Business Analytics & Optimization for the Intelligent Enterprise, notes:
The information explosion has permanently changed the way we experience the world: everything – and everyone – is leaving digital tracks. Intelligence is increasingly embedded in objects.
What company wouldn’t want to operate with the kind of highly instrumented, interconnected and realtime intelligence that business analytics promises? While that may seem like a rhetorical question, the study IBM conducted as part of the launch of the new analytics service found that nearly eight in ten business leaders were making decisions based on gut and instinct. Business analytics is meant to change that.
Posted by
Jack Mason in
The Global Chief Supply Chain Officer Study kicked off in early March with a summit event in San Francisco.
This video features Sanjeev Nagrath, who leads the global supply chain management practice in IBM’s consulting unit, Global Business Services, and Karen Butner,with IBM’s Institute of Business Value.
20:46
Posted by
Jack Mason in
My colleague Adam Christensen wants to make Smarter Planet something that matters to each of us: something that more people can understand, appreciate and maybe even feel some degree of personal, emotional connection to.
Posted by
Jack Mason in
As we expand our social media outreach for Smarter Planet, we will begin to feature and point to other bloggers who are thinking and investigating issues related to intelligent infrastructure. (Please feel free to recommend, via comments here, blogs and sites that we should connect with.)
Here’s one example from the Healthnex blog, on wearable healthcare devices and a home monitering system developed by Intel.
You can also sift through several years of Healthnex posts on topics related to smarter planet such as "e-health trends," healthcare IT innovations, clinical decision support systems and genomics.
Jack Mason
IBM Global Business Services
jkmason@us.ibm.com
http://smarterplanet.tumblr.com
