Mike Ray, Vice President, Business Integration & Transformation, Integrated Supply Chain, IBM

By Mike Ray

It started 40 years ago, before it was trendy or being taught in business school.

Thomas J. Watson, Jr., IBM Chairman at the time, said: “We accept our responsibilities as a corporate citizen in community, national and world affairs; we serve our interests best when we serve the public interest…We want to be in the forefront of those companies which are working to make our world a better place.”  That was 1969.

IBM’s values shape and define our company and permeate all of our relationships; between our employees and our shareholders, our clients, the communities where our employees live and work, and among our network of suppliers.

We know that IBM’s sizable purchasing power is a unique resource that we must manage responsibly. We have a responsibility to hold ourselves, and our suppliers, to high standards of behavior including taking environmental programs beyond compliance with applicable laws and regulations. It entails a strong commitment to work with suppliers to encourage good practices and develop sound global markets.

Our work in the area of environmental management within the supply chain goes back to that time. In 1972, for example, IBM instituted environmental evaluation of suppliers providing hazardous waste management services. In 1980, we expanded environmental evaluations to cover certain production-related suppliers. Ten years later IBM expanded environmental evaluations to cover suppliers who provided product-recycling and disposal services.

In 1998, IBM began encouraging suppliers to align their environmental management system with the ISO 14001 standard and pursue registration. Then in 2002, we published the first IBM Corporate Responsibility Report and two years later issued IBM’s Supplier Conduct Principles.

In 2008, IBM joined the Carbon Disclosure Project’s Supply Chain program (the date of the program’s inception) and in 2010, we established management system requirements for suppliers regarding corporate responsibility and environmental management, including specific requirements for Greenhouse Gas emissions management.

I personally had the chance recently to join the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at its annual 2013 Climate Leaders Award. There, IBM was honored for its environmental leadership, including its supply chain management that advances sustainability.

And on Thursday, May 9, I was a guest speaker the U.S. EPA Center for Corporate Climate Leadership webinar where I shared our best practices for climate leadership in supply chain management. I was pleased that more than 150 representatives from corporations, government agencies and non-profits attended to learn more.

As we move forward in the 21^st century, I’m encouraged by an ever-expanding awareness of the social and environmental responsibility incumbent upon by corporations like ours. It’s a responsibility that IBM with the support of our 20,000+ suppliers in 90 countries has been committed to for many years, and will be for many to come.

Technorati Tags: environment, environmental protection, environmental stewardship, EPA, green, IBM Smarter Planet, integrated supply chain, Smarter Planet, smarter supply chain, sustainability

Takreem El-Tohamy, GM, IBM Middle East and Africa

By Takreem El-Tohamy

There’s a wonderful word in Swahili that I think expresses one of the imperatives for the future of Africa. The word is “harambee.” It means pulling together, collaborating and supporting each other. I believe that one of the key factors in the ability of African countries to create sustainable and equitable economic growth will be the emergence of innovation ecosystems. Harambee perfectly captures an essential element of such ecosystems—the ability of institutions and individuals to pull together and build a mutually supportive environment.

Innovation ecosystems are complex organisms that are difficult to create yet tremendously powerful when they work. Think Silicon Valley. They require a melding of all of the capabilities of governments, businesses, financiers, universities, and individuals. Together, these organizations and individuals provide the web of support that makes it easier for startups to launch and grow quickly, and for established companies to innovate more aggressively. With that kind of support, African entrepreneurs and businesses will find it easier to produce new products and services, or even create whole new industries. You can think of an innovation ecosystem as a collective intelligence—harnessed for the good of society.

IBM is committed to helping Africa build successful innovation ecosystems. The latest sign of this willingness is our new IBM Innovation Center in Nairobi, Kenya. It’s a place where people from established companies, universities and startups can tap IBM technology and expertise to help them create solutions to the country’s business and societal challenges. We’re dedicated to helping Kenya fulfill its Vision 2030, which provides a strategy aimed at helping large numbers of Kenyans emerge into the middle class. Here’s a video about the center..

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our company has been doing business in Africa since 1921, when we helped out with the South African census. Today, we are expanding rapidly. We have offices in more than 20 African countries, including South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco and my native Egypt. The company has helped deliver everything from online banking and dependable mobile phone services to technologies for improving city services and government transparency.

In 2012, IBM established its first research laboratory in Africa—in Nairobi. It’s one of only one dozen such labs worldwide. Here’s a video about the impact we believe the Nairobi lab will have across Africa.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My IBM colleagues and I understand that expanding in Africa comes with a unique set of challenges. Our company must aid in building the capacities of Africa’s people and institutions—including knowledge, technology infrastructure, business sophistication and governance. These are the underpinnings of innovation ecosystems.

What’s the key role for IBM in Africa? To help feed the momentum. As a strategic partner with governments, universities, established businesses and startups, IBM can provide a wealth of technology know-how and problem-solving expertise that helps kick start initiatives and accelerate the speed of change.

Africa is coming into its own. The spirit of harambee is helping to drive progress. And IBM is dedicated to helping African countries, companies and individuals achieve their aspirations.

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Here’s an IBM Blue Paper about what it takes to build innovation ecosystems in Africa.

Technorati Tags: africa, IBM

Rick Padinha, GM, IBM Global Operations and Delivery Excellence

By Rick Padinha

It takes a lot of systems integration to launch humans into space and bring them home safely. Think of all the science and engineering disciplines that come into play. But the expertise and technology required to build a large computing system for IBM’s global clients today can be just as daunting–especially as we take on the challenges of building a smarter planet. First you must deeply understand the client’s business and their place in the broader business ecosystem. You must gather and manage a tremendous amount of data. Then you must  design a solution and bring together all of the technologies involved, from computers to storage to software. Complex systems integration is at the heart of what IBM does.

I should know. I not only got a view into the challenges of systems integration in the 1960s; I now head up the Delivery Excellence group within IBM’s Global Business Services–a “special forces” team that’s tasked with heading off problems in big, complex engagements before they happen and fixing things when something goes wrong.

When I was a kid growing up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1950s and early ’60s, I was fascinated with aircraft and flying. I dreamed of being a military pilot, but  my goal of attending the US Naval Academy didn’t pan out. Instead, I studied aerospace engineering at Virginia Tech. The coolest part was I worked my way through college as a co-op student, mixing semesters in the classroom with real-life experience at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Marshall was headed by the legendary Wernher Von Braun, whose team established “rocket scientists” in popular culture as the brainiest of humans.

I was sort of a junior rocket scientist. My experiences at Marshall told me two things: 1) I didn’t want to work for a bureaucratic government agency and 2) I wanted to design information technology systems that would help vault the United States further into new realms of space exploration. So I joined IBM, which had a hand in many aspects of the space program.

That program was my professional home for the next 20 years. Those years were packed with learning, satisfactions and frustrations. I can still remember the worst day of my career. I was standing at a control center console watching a TV monitor when shuttle Challenger exploded on liftoff in 1986.  I learned that day that so-called “mission critical” systems aren’t just about the success or failures of missions; they’re also about life and death.

It became clear to me over time that the key to building successful mission-critical systems is a relentless focus on quality–in knowledge, hardware design, software programming, systems integration and operations.

During the next phases of my career, I worked on integrating one major mission-critical system after another. Some of the bigger projects I headed up were the Amadeus airline reservation system and the US air traffic control system.

In the late 1980s, IBM’s leaders saw the huge potential in systems integration, and that insight helped lay the foundation for the company’s services business. Services, which came into their own in the 1990s, became a crucial factor as IBM clawed back from its near-death experience in 1993. They now provide more than half of IBM’s revenues.

I’ve lived through the long evolution of technology services. As a result, I never fell prey to the idea that products, per se, are the key to providing business value. Because of my experiences, I understand in my bones that the key to business success is viewing the world through the problem-solver lens–and then bringing to bear the right mix of computer hardware, software, business processes and services to get the job done. From working with NASA in the 1960s to working with many of IBM’s clients today, it’s clear to me that the skills and disciplines of systems integration are absolutely essential to making the world work better.

Technorati Tags: Huntsville, IBM, NASA

Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO

Over the past several years, Big Data, analytics, cloud, mobile and social technologies have infused our world. These technologies provide the instrumentation, interconnection and intelligence that make it possible to build a smarter planet. But, in order to do so, countries, cities, corporations and individuals need to rethink how they go about achieving their goals. Tune in here at the A Smarter Planet blog at 6 p.m. United States E.T. on March 7 to watch a live video of IBM CEO Ginni Rometty laying out her vision of the path forward at the Council on Foreign Relations. Join the conversation here and on Twitter at #IBM and #CFRlive.

Technorati Tags: Council on Foreign Relations, Ginni Rometty

Robert LeBlanc, Senior Vice President, IBM Software Group

By Robert LeBlanc

The era of the mobile enterprise has officially arrived.  Half of American workers are now using smart devices for work as well as personal usage.  The use of those devices is now at a critical mass and its just the beginning.

Yet Gartner, a leading information technology research and advisory company, says few organizations plan and manage mobility with a truly strategic or proactive approach. They’re mostly reactive and tactical.

For enterprises, mobility shouldn’t be about the device. Instead, it needs to be about figuring out what an organization can do differently and better now that its employees and customers use mobile technologies so frequently at work and in their private lives, and access processes and data anywhere and anytime. (IBM today announced a new generation of mobile enterprise technologies that are based on this point of view.)

Simply put, mobility changes everything for the enterprise.  And that puts business leaders on the hot seat—forcing them to grapple with one of the biggest  challenges of business today.  Its a question of when, not if, mobile technology will impact the business.

A mobile enterprise is an organization built on a foundation of technologies and business processes that enables people to connect, share information, and participate in the business processes no matter where they are. This facility allows businesses, employees, and customers to better understand the world around them so they can make smarter and quicker decisions. And, just as importantly, it helps them interact more effectively with all of their constituents.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mobility forces leaders to rethink how they operate their businesses, how they deal with employees and customers, and how they manage their information and their technology. By its very nature, mobility makes it more difficult and challenging for IT leaders to control people and information. So they have to achieve a judicious balance between the need to loosen their hold on many aspects of their businesses with the need to assure the security and integrity of business processes and information.

What are these challenges ?

How to operate the business: Many fundamental business processes were established in an era when companies tightly controlled every aspect of their operations. Mobility disrupts those linear flows of work and information. Now, business leaders have to restructure their business processes to take into account new kinds of interactions with customers, employees and business partners, and new sources of information. Example: How can a B-to-C company run an outstanding marketing program without taking into account the locations of customers and their real-time communications via social media?

How to interact with clients: Today, most businesses recognize the importance of their clients, but mobility and the emergence of big data add new elements to this calculus. CEOs understand that their most important assets are not just their employees but also the vast storehouses of information they possess and the day to day interaction with their clients. Leaders have to deal with the fact that, because of the mobility revolution, many of their most important clients have choices in who they interact with, when they interact and the type of interaction.  It is imperative they take advantage of this new paradigm, embrace it, innovate around it and improve their client experiences.

How to manage employees: For all the talk about flat organizations and employee empowerment, many organizations still operate under the command-and-control management model. Today, thanks to mobility technologies, employees have the means to gather information and make decisions on the spot, and, increasingly, they’ll want to act. Leaders should empower them to exercise their judgment and creativity. Mobility is a great enabler. At the same time, though, organizations need to establish policies, practices and training programs that protect the company and its customers from undue risks.

How to manage information: Many companies keep their information in silos aligned with particular business units and functions. Most of what they gather sits in databases in rows and columns. But the coming era of big data means a tremendous amount of information of different types is now available—including unstructured data from sensors, video and Web pages. This information must be shared across the enterprise, and, naturally, it will be pushed and pulled via mobile technologies. Companies have to manage their information so it is easily accessible for those who need it and, at the same time, protected from unauthorized access.

How to manage technology: For established business, most of their technology was installed before mobility became such a big factor. It makes no sense to rip and replace it. Instead, companies should add-on capabilities that make it easy for the data and business processes managed in legacy computing systems to be available via mobile devices. New business processes and software applications should be developed with a “mobile first” mindset.  That way, accessibility and security will be designed in from the start. Mobility should always be evaluated in the context of the other major technology shifts that are around it today, namely, cloud computing, data analytics and social business. These new capabilities are all game-changers individually, but, together, they can transform a business, making it more efficient, dynamic and productive.

Embracing change and the impacts of technology like mobility is a great opportunity for most businesses.  Change is inevitable.   Those that harness it and exploit it correctly will be leaders.  But technology for technology sake is not the full equation.  The combination of technology along with the changing business processes, insights derived from data analytics and the changing interaction among people is the game changer.

Technorati Tags: IBM, mobile enterprise

MoDe, short for Mobile Decisioning Africa Ltd., is a mobile micro-finance company based in Nairobi, Kenya, that provides mobile carriers with an online system for topping off their customers’ pre-paid subscriber accounts based not on cash payments but on credit. In emerging markets, the majority of mobile phone owners pay as they go, replenishing their accounts when need be at retail kiosks. But what happens when customers run out of time in the middle of a conversation, or when no kiosk is nearby? MoDe keeps them going.

MoDe is a prime example of the kind of innovation that is sweeping Africa these days. Most Africans don’t have PCs and Internet connections, so the mobile phone has become the go-to platform for communications and online services. Dozens of African companies have sprung up to create mobile applications that address the fundamental needs of Africans.

Click here to view the embedded video.

IBM’s SmartCamp program brings together startup entrepreneurs who focus on Smarter Planet-style business opportunities with veteran entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other business professionals. The entrepreneurs pitch their business plans to judges, receive feedback, refine their pitches and, ultimately, present to larger audiences made up of business leaders and academics in the host cities. MoDe won a preliminary event in South Africa, one of seven held worldwide last year, before advancing to the finals.

Past participants in the contest have partnered with IBM to deliver new products and services to clients and to expand into new markets. In addition, startups have raised more than $90 million from venture capitalists.

The founders of MoDe hope that winning the contest will further accelerate their already rapid growth. Founded in 2010, the company is doing business in 15 countries in Africa. Now it hopes to expand into Latin American, Asia, Europe and even the United States. “This experience has taken us 15 years ahead in a matter of four months,” says Julian Kyula, MoDe co-founder and CEO. “We have met important people, developed relationships and made contacts that could lead to funding.” Co-founder Josphat Kinyua, who runs finance and business development, says the contest has given MoDe additional credibility with potential business partners. “How do you convince people to trust you? This helps,” he says.

For MoDe’s founders, airtime credit is just the beginning. They plan on adding other financial services to their portfolio in the coming months and years–including micro-credit for prepaid electric utilities, rail travel and television subscriptions.

Why is innovation exploding in Africa? For Kyula, the answer is simple:  “Solutions are found where problems exist,” he says. Africa still has lots of challenges, but, with entrepreneurs like Kyula and Kinyua on the case, you can expect to see innovations emerging in Africa that not only address basic human needs across the continent but which spread and make a difference globally in the years ahead.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Mobile Decisioning Africa, MoDe, smartcamp

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty

Fairfax is a prime example of a company that has aggressively adopted technology to transform the way it does business and interacts with customers. Hywood was a featured speaker today at IBM’s CMO+CIO Leadership Symposium in Sydney, where IBM executives and clients interacted with nearly 100 chief marketing and chief information officers from Australia’s leading companies.

In a keynote address, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty told the audience that the explosion of data makes it possible for companies to address customers as individuals. “I think this will change the relationship you have with your customers fundamentally, no matter what industry,” she said. “And it will change the relationship between the CMO and CIO.”

Like many companies around the world, businesses in Australia and New Zealand are waking up to the opportunity to use data not just from transactions but from insights gleaned from social media and other new sources to understand their customers better and market to them more successfully. This means chief marketing officers are in an unaccustomed position. It is they, rather than the chief information officers, who can see clearest the need for leveraging information technology in new ways. That situation argues strongly for CMOs and CIOs to join forces and lead in the transformations of their companies in this era of big data. Each can bring their own expertise to the partnership.

Working together, CMOs and CIOs can take advantage of four technology shifts that are revolutionising the world of business: mobile, cloud, social business and analytics. Each of these shifts is a revolution in itself, but, taken together, they are helping to rewrite the business leadership agenda. Many companies, including IBM, are exploring a “mobile first” marketing strategy–designing applications, messages, owned content and advertising that fits the dimensions and use scenarios of smartphones and tablets. Cloud computing is often the fastest route to launching a new marketing program and offering new products and services to customers. Social business software enables deeper collaboration between employees and beyond corporate boundaries. And analytics software mines insights from all of the new sources in near real time, making it possible to anticipate and take advantage of sudden shifts in the market .

One of the reasons Fairfax has weathered the digital media storm relatively well is the company’s willingness to see what’s coming and adapt. Surprisingly, soon after the emergence of the Internet in the 1990s, it was two Fairfax librarians who alerted editors to the potential of the Net as a powerful information source. Ever since, the company has vowed to lead the digital transition. Now they have dozens of mobile applications and Web sites targeting everything from news to lifestyles. “It’s an iterative process. We need to stay ahead of the customer,” said Hywood.

In the past, many companies felt comfortable by adopting the “fast follower” approach. They could survey what their most nimble competitors were doing and monitor shifts in customer demand and feel confident that they wouldn’t be left too far behind. No more. Markets change so quickly. Look how fast Apple has lost the feature edge in the smartphone category. So it’s incumbent on corporate executives–and CMOs and CIOs in particular–to map a course and adopt technology that puts their organizations out front and keeps them there.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, cloud, Fairfax Media, IBM, mobile, social busienss

Yet for Africa to fulfill it’s potential and emerge among the world’s economic tigers, social and business leaders agree that much more innovation must happen there. The continent’s cities, universities, entrepreneurs and commercial R&D organizations can become engines of innovation producing new products and services that are tailored for the African experience.  And,  in order to make this transition, African institutions and businesses–plus multinational corporations –must work together to create innovation ecosystems that foster this kind of creativity.

At IBM’s Smarter Planet Leadership Forum today in Nairobi, Kenya, CEO Ginni Rometty said IBM hopes to work collaboratively with the people and institutions in Africa: “We want to be seen as a citizen of the countries, essential to the government, companies and people.”  Rometty said IBM’s decision to locate an IBM Research laboratory on the continent–beginning with an office in Nairobi–sends the strong signal about the company’s commitment to Africa.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The message is clear: Rometty wants IBM to play an active role in building innovation ecosystems in Africa.

California’s Silicon Valley is the prototype innovation ecosystem. It benefitted from the combination of good universities, entrepreneurial companies, government incentives and robust supplies of venture capital. Many of other places have tried to copy Silicon Valley’s formula—some quite successfully, among them Bangalore, India, and Singapore.

Kenya is among the countries in Africa that have the potential of creating a vibrant innovation ecosystem. Students and entrepreneurs dream of tapping science and technology to solve social and business problems. Universities aim to expand their research and teaching programs in science, math and technology. Business leaders are creating startup incubators to encourage entrepreneurship—places like iHub, FabLab Nairobi and NaiLab

The government is playing a vital role, too, by making bold moves aimed at establishing Kenya as an information technology hub for East Africa. The government recently broke ground for Konzo Techno City, a new municipality being built from scratch south of Nairobi to bring research universities, corporations and government agencies together to support job creation, research collaboration and economic development. Another key move was the launch by the Kenya ICT Board of an incubation program for high-tech startups—including seed capital funding. “If we can build the skills and innovate, it will change the entire continent,” said Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary of Kenya’s ministry of information and science.

But there’s an important role for foreign companies and academic institutions to play, as well—as partners with African institutions in making progress. IBM Research’s new research laboratory in Nairobi is the first basic scientific research lab to be established in Africa by a foreign multinational firm. We have allied with Catholic University of Eastern Africa to locate the lab on its Nairobi campus.The goal of the lab is to produce innovations within Africa and also bring in great ideas from IBM’s other 11 research labs around the world. “We want to create technology solutions optimized for Africa that can be exported to the rest of the developing world,” John Kelly, senior vice president and director of IBM Research said earlier this week.

While the first lab office is in Nairobi, IBM plans on expanding elsewhere around the continent and also performing collaborative research with a number of universities. Already, the company is engaging with the University of Nairobi and Strathmore University in collaborative programs where scientists from IBM will work with university faculty members on projects of mutual interest.

In another sign that Kenya is beginning to offer an attractive academic environment, Columbia University, one of the leading academic institutions in the United States, has set up Columbia Global Centre/Africa as a venue for research aimed at helping African nations reach their UN Millennium Development Goals.

We believe that foreign firms and institutions won’t succeed if they try to build islands of expertise. They must work with local universities on collaborative research and to improve the quality of degree programs. Sure, if this happens it will mean that IBM Research will have to compete vigorously to recruit and retain the most skilled and ambitious young people. But so be it. “This is a long term investment,” said Kelly. “We’re here to help build the skills and, hopefully, we’ll get our fair share of the most talented graduates.”

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Related Links

Read about the next technology leapfrogging opportunity in Africa: big data.

Find out how Reading Companion inspires a love of reading in South African schools.

Technorati Tags: africa, Ginni Rometty, IBM Research

Municipal governments have the greatest direct impact on the lives of their constituents and no matter how tight the budget, citizens expect, and deserve, action.  So mayors have to think innovatively to accomplish goals, deliver services more efficiently and effectively and stimulate economic development.

Philadelphia Mayor Michael A. Nutter

Philadelphia Mayor Michael A. Nutter has not pared back his ambitious agenda despite reduced funding.  One major focus: access to a quality education, which he refers to as “the new civil rights fight.”  Mayor Nutter supports a number of creative initiatives designed to provide Philadelphians with educational opportunities and job skills to prepare them for the 21^st century workforce.

Philadelphia is one of more than 60 cities worldwide that have participated in IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge program. IBM sends teams of six executives to participating cities to help them develop solutions to difficult problems. Nutter and other mayors have provided insights in to what it takes to transform cities. The lessons they learned are captured in a white paper, How to Reinvent a City.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Greater Philadelphia region is home to 101 colleges and universities, but the City of Philadelphia still struggles with low literacy, high school graduation and college attainment rates.  During the Nutter administration’s first five years in office, these rates have steadily improved, though these numbers are still below the Mayor’s goals.

To ensure best educational practices are implemented across the school system and improve the overall quality of education in the city, Mayor Nutter and the Pennsylvania Education Department support the ‘Great Schools Compact,’ a collaborative of School District, charter and Archdiocese schools with the goal of increasing the number of seats in high-performing schools.

Mayor Nutter is also championing the new digital learning initiative, Digital On-Ramps, which the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge team helped shape.  The Digital On-Ramps initiative aims to provide comprehensive education and workforce training support to Philadelphians ages 14-65.  The goal is create an anytime, anywhere, any device learning community that works to improve math and literacy skills, assist in job searches and provide digital skill training. The only way people will lift themselves out of poverty is through education, and we need to connect people in new, easily-accessible ways,” Mayor Nutter said.

Moreover, 230,000 Philadelphia households do not have internet access at home.  To help address the big challenge of the digital divide, the City of Philadelphia is working with programs that make logging on easier and more affordable: KeySPOTS and Internet Essentials.  KeySPOTS are federally-funded computer centers, 77 in total, located in neighborhoods where residential access is small.  Internet Essentials is a partnership program with Comcast.  With Internet Essentials, people who receive free or reduced lunches are eligible for a reduced price personal computer and internet service and a free modem.

While access won’t solve the education challenges Philadelphia faces, it can support learning goals and, ultimately, achievement.  Mayor Nutter added, “No matter what you’re working on, there is a technology solution, application and engagement that’s going to help you do things smarter, better, quicker, more efficiently or more productively.”

Technorati Tags: mayors, Nutter, Philadelphia, technology

Today, thanks to deep analytics, we can for the first time understand the complexities of cities in motion.

IBM Researchers have developed analytics software that provides accurate and meaningful information about massive numbers of peoples’ movements. These insights can be used by city managers to plan new transit routes, improve the efficiency of current transit systems, and coordinate the various transportation modes with a goal of making moving around in cities a lot more convenient and comfortable. The project, Insights in Motion, is a so-called First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) collaboration with transportation officials in Dubuque, Iowa, and Istanbul, Turkey.

A paper about Dubuque’s piece of the project, Dubuque Smart Travel, was presented Jan. 16 at the annual meeting of the  Transportation Research Board.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Until now, city officials based their knowledge of transportation activities on a wide variety of information–including everything from trip and ticket sales data, to surveys of transit passengers, to actual counts of people on a particular bus or subway car at a particular time in a particular place. The problem is, all of these types of information only provide fragments of the bigger picture. A survey of people on a particular bus route, for instance, only tells you about the people who are riding the bus–not about people who are moving in the same direction at the same time via other means who might ride the bus under other circumstances.

The Insights in Motion technology draws on transit data, geo-spacial information, census records, points-of-interest information and data from cell phones and smart phones. The telephone data is completely anonymous so no individual’s privacy is compromised. By tracking the movements of thousands of people from place to place and correlating it with time and the speed of travel, the system understands the mode of transportation people are using and knows where they’re traveling to and from–whether its home, work, school or shopping. For city planners, it’s a revelation. “It’s like a blind person for the first time opening their eyes and seeing,” says Milind Naphade, leader of the IBM Research project.

The project got its start because IBM Research scientists were looking for a real city in which to test their Smarter Planet technology ideas. The small but aspiring Mississippi River town of Dubuque agreed to become a living laboratory for experiments. One of the goals there was to increase the use of the public bus system, so Naphade and his colleagues proposed developing a system for analyzing the transportation needs of a small city. They applied within IBM Research to make Dubuque Transit a FOAK program, jointly funded by IBM and a client. They were asked to also choose another city, a larger one in an emerging market, and ultimately, they picked Istanbul.

So they had two living laboratories that are as different as you can imagine: a small city with just 23,000 households and only one source of public transit, buses; and a sprawling city with 14 million residents, 1 million tourists annually, and a wide range of transit options–subway, light rail, express buses, traditional buses, minibuses and ferries.

They started in Dubuque. In addition to gathering mobile phone location data (with no personal information included) from telecom carriers, they also recruited 1,000 volunteers who own smart phones. The high-end handhelds are equipped with GPS and accelerometers, which makes it possible to track the volunteers as they travel around the city with pinpoint location and speed-of-movement accuracy.

Their task was challenging. They had to build a system that could, in a sense,”understand” what a city is, what people are, what people do, and how they move from place to place. They needed a digital model of a city that they could experiment with.  They built a framework of knowledge about each individual’s activities, including detecting meaningful locations, segmenting trips, calculating the duration of stay, identifying the purpose of each trip, plotting origins and destinations of each trip, tracking the time of day, and specifying the mode of transportation. They even estimated the carbon footprint of each trip. Then they aggregated all of the information about individuals to generate city-wide statistics.

The team used the results to optimize the routes and schedules for the city’s bus transit system. The objective was to minimize the sum of operator costs, user costs and unsatisfied demand costs for the entire network. Costs aren’t just expressed in dollars. For users of the system, for instance, they include factors like waiting, walking and driving a car. Dubuque is now trying the information out on two pilot projects–new bus routes it didn’t operate before. “Having the data is crucial. You don’t have to operate on tea leaves,” says Chandra Ravada, director of the transportation department for Iowa’s East Central Intergovernmental Association. “You know where people are going. You can change things based on that. You’re designing your system not on somebody’s opinion but based on facts.”

Naphade and his team took the lessons learned in Dubuque and applied them in Istanbul. Their task there was way more complex. There were so many more people and modes of transportation. Also, in Istanbul, they didn’t track volunteers with Smart Phones. They had to rely on less precise records from regular mobile phones. But the technologies they had used in Dubuque also worked in Istanbul. The city’s transit authority is using the Insights in Motion tool to help design feeder bus routes connecting to the cities new subway lines. The goal is to reduce operating expenses by 40%, meet 37% more demand, reduce average commuter time by 60% and reduce per-traveler combustion emissions by 40%.

At the highest level, Naphade believes that Insights in Motion has tremendous potential to alter the relationships of cities and their citizens. “One thing I think about is how we have become slaves of the infrastructure rather than having the infrastructure work for us,” he says. “Cities should help people live their lives, not get in the way.”

Technorati Tags: Dubuque, FOAK, IBM Research, Istanbul