Terry F. Yosie, President and CEO of the World Environment Center

By Terry F. Yosie

Environmental issues are big, thorny problems. Scarcities in water, food and raw materials are too complex for any single company or non-governmental organization to solve on its own.  In order to make a difference, it’s necessary to collaborate with like-minded partners to achieve shared goals.

Collaboration is a normal feature of customer-supplier relationships, government-business partnerships and initiatives with universities and other partners. It’s also typical for organizations looking for new business models that can sustain profitability while addressing societal needs, natural resource management, product and service innovation, and differentiation of brand value, to name a few.  Collaboration can spur organizations to redefine their business purpose by utilizing society as another kind of R&D lab for innovation. 

Coca-Cola’s Global Water Strategy is a good example. Water is clearly essential to the company’s business – for its beverages and also for growing the agricultural products they need. The company instituted a global program to promote water resource sustainability. It set global strategic direction on water, established policy and requirements, and formed and managed key partnerships with organizations such as the WWF and USAID.

Another example is IBM’s work with cities in emerging economies such as Africa. It requires years of building on-the-ground relationships and capabilities while turning projects into partnerships that generate positive economic, environmental and social results. IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge – the company’s single largest philanthropic initiative — deploys teams of employees to work with cities around the world to deliver detailed recommendations addressing key urban issues identified by local elected officials and other stakeholders. A recent report, “A Vision for Smarter Growth: an IBM Smarter Cities Report on Accra, Ghana” highlights how this rapidly emerging West African city should turn to technology to transform key city systems such as transportation and energy.

Many companies are still finding their footing as they try to build global collaboration to match their global business strategies. This requires a “system-level” understanding of societal and environmental changes that can transform global economy and society. At the World Environment Center, we’re seeing more companies beginning to recognize how issues such as population growth, urbanization, food security and natural resource management may affect their business and impact return on investment.

Such decisions rarely occur in a vacuum. For example, investment decisions to upgrade power generation should take into account interconnected energy and water use in building design and maintenance. Only a “system-level” understanding of goals will enable companies to develop more innovative approaches to understanding both customer and societal needs.

For collaboration to succeed on a larger scale, we need global networks of companies, national agencies, NGOs and foundations, such as those created to eradicate malaria. Organizations can jointly develop licensing standards and transparency practices. They can work towards specific goals, performance metrics, and accountable behaviors to make a difference — from individual projects, to Big Bang transformational initiatives.

Collaboration is key to developing solutions to the mounting global challenges of current and future generations.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, Earth Day, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Public Health, Smarter Planet, sustainability

Here’s U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown for Ohio talking about his belief that innovation will accelerate economic growth in his state:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nearly four years into the Smarter Planet journey, IBMers have undertaken more than 2,000 engagements with governments and businesses aimed helping them use cutting-edge technologies to make their systems for getting things done work better. These encounters are all over the map, geographically and figuratively. But important lessons are being learned. And, in particular, one interesting pattern is emerging. For organizations of all types, good outcomes depend on addressing the yin and yang of building a smarter planet: a combination of improvisation and preparedness–or long term planning.

Improvisation: In the realm of smarter planet problems and solutions, there’s so much variability that no single blueprint will fit every overtly similar situation. Organizations have to be flexible and creative to get stuff done. They can’t let the need for a master plan or budget-tightening pressures paralyze them.

Preparedness: While creative fixes can help city leaders manage their systems for the short-term, the longer-term vitality of cities, countries and organizations depends on leaders adopting a mission and a strategy for achieving it. But even that’s not enough. They have to anticipate the challenges to come–everything from next year’s big storm to the impacts of climate change to the next big financial shock–and build resilient systems capable of withstanding them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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A good example of improvisation comes from Nairobi, Kenya. Throughout the world, many cities are starting to roll out vast networks of video cameras trained on highways and intersections. The  goal is to use video images to provide up-to-the-minute reads on traffic conditions–so local authorities can manage traffic better by changing traffic signals, rerouting, or sending police or public works employees to address problems as they emerge. In Nairobi, rather than wait for an extensive deployment of its own video cameras, the city made a deal with a local Internet service provider that had installed some cameras so it could show live traffic situations on its Web portal. They have plans to buy and deploy their own network of cameras. “But, in the mean time, they’re working in partnership with a private company. They’re making do,” says Wendy Lung, the director of corporate strategy for IBM Venture Capital Group.

Lung was one of six IBM executives who recently spent three weeks in Nairobi working with local authorities to help them come up with a plan for modernizing the transportation system. They’re participating in IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge as members of the Executive Service Corps, a free, volunteer effort modeled on the US Peace Corps that’s aimed at providing expert advice to cities around the world while helping IBM train leaders capable of dealing with the cultural, political and financial challenges inherent in doing business globally.

The Nairobi leaders didn’t see their arrangement with the ISP as the long term solution, but it’s a practically approach to problem solving that works and helps them get stuff done. And it raises the question: What other creative approaches could the Kenyan government leaders take to accomplish their goals? Lung and her colleagues had creative problem solving in mind when they made recommendations at the end of their engagement in Nairobi. One of them: That a wide variety of government agencies in Kenya–and, indeed, across East Africa–would to well to share a single cloud computing set up for handling many of their transportation-management needs. This would make it easier to share information between government agencies, and they’d save money, as well.

But while Nairobi’s short-term approach to getting access to traffic video was smart, inspired improvisation only goes so far. Consider last year’s Japanese earthquake and tsunami. It’s impossible to respond adequately to a disaster of that magnitude. So it’s vital to take the long view, anticipate potential problems, and build systems capable of avoiding them or diminishing their impact.

This approach depends to a great extent on honesty and transparency. Organizations and societies have to be willing to confront their vulnerabilities and make the policy changes and financial investments necessary for dealing with them.

Colin Harrison, an IBM Smarter Cities technical strategist, has traveled to Japan repeatedly since the quake to help out with recovery and preparedness. A surprise discovery in the aftermath, he believes, teaches us a great deal about the importance of facing our societal demons head on.

The Japanese coastline has cliffs some 60-80 meters high that are pierced by rivers draining the inland plain. These rivers have carved narrow valleys ending in bays. There are many small fishing villages along this coast. When the tsunami struck, the wall of water entered the bays and the steep valley walls acted like funnels—so the flood surged high and devastated the fishing villages. In the aftermath of the quake,  people discovered long-forgotten, centuries-old stone markers in these valleys that are inscribed with warnings not to build houses below the level of the markers. Japanese ancestors knew of the risks of major tsunamis, but over the centuries their descendants forgot or decided to take the risk.

Harrison’s takeaway: “Prepare for the next disasters by making societies more resilient—because disasters will surely come.” One of the core principles for achieving resilience is to create diversity within systems. That way, if one element fails, others can succeed and help balance out the losses. The Internet is designed based on that principle. In the district east of the Japanese city of Sendai, which was devastated by the quake and tsunami, the people living there had become critically dependent on one form of economic activity, farming. When the disaster struck, their entire economy was destroyed, since the salt water has made their land infertile for decades to come. IBM is now working with universities and farmers to establish new approaches to agriculture, such as hydroponic farming.

Resilience has become a major theme for IBM researchers in Japan, the United States, Australia and elsewhere. Much of this work is being done in collaboration with governments and universities. But there’s a private sector angle, as well. A group of major corporations has become so concerned about the resilience of societies and industrial infrastructure that they have formed a loose confederation, called the Resilience Action Initiative, to proactively address issues arising over the next decades due to the combination of population growth and resource constraints.

It’s early days for the initiative, but IBM has begun gathering information and experiences that can help build a new methodology for creating resilience. In fact, it treats some of the Executive Services Corps engagements as”scouting parties” to help shape their thinking, says Harrison.

Which takes us back to the yin and yang of the smarter planet. In a time with so many economic, political and social conflicts in play, the push and pull between improvisation and preparedness is shaping up to be one of the important dialectical relationships of the 21st Century–and one that won’t be easy to work out.

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Read a white paper about IBM’s commitment to Africa.

Here’s a white paper about IBM’s Transportation Maturity Model.

Here’s a study by UN-HABITAT about Nairobi’s economic prospects.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Japan, Kenya, Nairobi, Resilience Action Initiative

One of their biggest headaches is infrastructure–their roads, bridges, sidewalks, water lines and sewer pipes. They used to fix things when they broke. These days, increasingly, the forward-thinkers among them aim to fix things before they have a chance to break. And they’re using technology to help them optimize the way they invest in infrastructure maintenance and renewal.

Cambridge, a small city in Ontario, Canada, is in the vanguard of getting this right. It has been working with IBM Research to develop a system for prioritizing the city’s investments in fixing or replacing physical infrastructure so they meet the public’s needs while making the most of their limited budget. “We look at how we can use technology and revised business practices to make the city work better,” says Mike Hausser, Cambridge’s director of asset management and support services.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Canadians got their wake up call about crumbling infrastructure a few years ago when a series of mishaps and mistakes led to the contamination of the water supply in tiny Walkerton, Ontario, by E. coli bacteria. Half of the city’s population of 5,000 became ill and seven people died. That incident and others led to development of Federal and Provincial regulations regarding asset management. Campbridge, in anticipation of those regulations, pro-actively created an Asset Management Division to comply with regulations and to better understand and manage its infrastructure debt and deficit. A few years later, after IBM announced its Smarter Planet agenda, the two organizations began working together on a capital investment management system that’s being tested in the city today.

The system, called PALM (for Planning Analytics for Asset Lifecycle Management), is integrated with Cambridge’s pre-existing asset management and logistics systems. Working together, the systems help managers answer a series of key questions: What do I need to do? How should I do it? What funding will support it? And how should I optimize my activities so I get the maximum return on investment?

The IBM Research team that designed PALM had just completed a major technology project in a similar vein for the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Dept. They conducted a series of meetings with Cambridge leaders in mid-2011 and then agreed to collaborate on a so-called First of a Kind (FOAK) project. “I’m a math guy sitting with a guy who has 30 years of experience in fixing roads and water pipes. He knows a whole lot more about that stuff than I do,” recalls Tarun Kumar, the researcher who heads the IBM team. “We didn’t have a lot in common on the surface, but we came up with something that’s unique–a common innovation agenda.”

The infrastructure investment project was high on Cambridge’s priority list. That’s because it’s facing a ticking infrastructure time bomb in the coming decades. The city of 135,000 went through growth spurts in the 1950s, the 1970s and the 1980s. In each case, new roads and water and sewer pipes were installed. Since then, the city has invested in basic maintenance, but it hasn’t yet taken on the more challenging task of replacing large chunks of infrastructure (road, water, and sewers) before they fail.  And some of them are beginning to fail now.

For example, in the 1960s the city installed thin-wall cast iron water main pipes made from new metal alloys that were designed to save money and materials. Unfortunately, about half of the pipes are starting to break down–decades ahead of their original life expectancy.

When a city starts contemplating digging up a lot of water mains, it has to take into consideration the other stuff that’s nearby–including roads, sidewalk and sewer lines. This is where the analytics comes in. The IBMers gathered millions of discreet pieces of information about the city’s 250,000 critical transportation and public works assets drawn from the records of multiple city departments. That’s a lot of data to manage, but, adding to the complexity of the challenge, some vital information is missing. The city has only 10 years of asset management information, and, in many cases, it doesn’t know the condition of the pipes buried deep underground in specific locations.

The IBM Research team developed technology that is now enabling Cambridge’s leaders to make strategic and operational decisions. The researchers developed algorithms to predict which assets will fail and when. Those predictions feed into a needs-assessment engine that helps city planners to identify the options they should consider. Should a water pipe be relined or replaced? Should a road be repaved with a thin overlay or should it be reground and resurfaced? Each option comes with a cost-benefit analysis. In addition, the technology allows planners to consider other factors, including the effect that one repair would have on other nearby infrastructure. That way, the city managers hope to avoid situations like having to dig up a road to replace water pipes just a new months after the road has been repaved. Better to wait to repave after the digging is done.

The prescription options are then fed to an investment planning tool that helps planners choose the best funding sources for each project. The analysis tool considers factors such as criticality, risk and funding constraints. When planners put forth their investment proposals to elected officials, they can back them up with solid facts and rationales.

This kind of technology has potential not only in cities but in any industry that buys a lot of equipment and maintains a large physical infrastructure. Think oil and gas exploration and distribution companies, and electric utilities. They all need to better  manage the stuff they own. “Companies need to listen to their assets so they can figure out what they need to do,” says Kumar.

Listen to your assets. That has a nice ring to it. In the era of big data, you can bet we’ll be doing a lot of listening.

Technorati Tags: Cambridge, IBM

Klesyk has made a lot of progress. The 209-year-old company has centralized and re-organized its operational processes and claims handling, restructured the workforce, and evolved into a customer-oriented and performance-based organization. Klesyk’s goal now is to become the largest and most profitable insurance company in central and eastern Europe.

PZU and IBM Poland combined forces to complete Operation Trigger–the company’s operational overhaul. They way they worked together provides a model for how such  business transformation projects can be managed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Operation Trigger got its start in 2010 when the back office operations of several PZU business units were relocated to a building in Warsaw. At the time, each business unit had its own way of handling claims and communicating with customers. In addition, most of this work was done using paper, rather than digitally. The company decided to consolidate and standardize its claims processing and customer communications. “We needed to optimize our business processes. We created new work flow processes from scratch,” says Przemyslaw Nakonieczny, the customer service development manager who headed up the Trigger project on PZU’s business side.

Over a one-year period, PZU and IBM staffers worked together to create more than 160 business processes in PZU’s document processing, mail room and call center operations. The processes govern the handling of all claims and customer communications from the moment a new claim or inquiry is received until it is resolved. Each engagement with a customer is organized into a “case” and all the physical documents connected to a case are tracked with bar codes and converted into digital form.The system grants access to employees based on their business roles and competencies. In each case, PZU communicates with customers about their cases in the forms that are most appropriate, including emails, phone calls, faxes and traditional mail.

It’s a smart system because each kind of document and process is completed using a template, and the software recognizes the template and routes the document through the workflow system accordingly.

Trigger was extremely complicated, so, from the start, the two companies set up a steering committee of executives to oversee it. Anna Sienko, general manager of IBM Poland and the Baltic Countries, attended several of the early meetings, as did top executives at PZU.

Key to the success of the project was the willingness of both sides to be flexible and the project leaders’ dedication to understanding what their internal clients needed to do their jobs better. “We called them the ‘Red High Heels,’ and the joke was that when the Red High Heels wanted something, they got it,” says Ewa Preston, the IBM Global Business Services consultant to managed the engagement for IBM. “The idea was to make their jobs easier, and they’re the ones who knew how to make things easier and quicker.”

The project was completed last December, and it’s delivering on PZU’s objectives. Nakonieczny estimates that it increased the efficiency of case handling by about 20%. In PZU’s 2011 annual report, issued in March, the company reported that its annual administrative expenses dropped by 6.8% last year, even while the gross written premiums increased by 3.7%. The report credits the centralizing of operational process and claims handling.

PZU’s transformation is still going on, but CEO Klesyk is clearly feeling confident in the company’s future. The company on May 12 introduced a new logo–replacing a traditional one with a simpler image. The move was controversial in some circles, but it sent a clear message, symbolizing “the simplification of procedures, care for the costumer and a modern approach,” the company says.

Here are the before and after images:

Technorati Tags: Andrzej Klesyk, IBM, Poland, PZU

This week I had the honor of announcing a new project that my department is launching with the help of IBM to reduce crime in the City of Charleston. Our department, like those in New York, London, Vancouver and many other elite cities, is utilizing advanced technology to bring the next evolution in police work to our residents and visitors. Our goal is to make Charleston one of the safest cities in which to live and visit.

At its core, the project will allow us to take a new, more holistic view into historical crime statistics and patterns to allow our 400 plus officers to add technology, based on the latest advancements in analytics, to the tools they use to prevent crime before it happens.  This initiative bridges the art and science of law enforcement together in a manner that supports both tactical and strategic decision-making.  It’s all about augmenting the officer’s and commander’ s experience and knowledge with the information they need to make appropriate decisions that allow resources to be in the right place at the right time, so potential criminals think twice about committing a crime.

In my opinion, this project represents the cutting edge for the future of public safety and a significant move toward Smarter Policing in America.

Officer Earnest Terrell of the Charleston PD prepares for his night shift.

But I firmly believe that this is just the beginning.  I have learned that we must expand our thinking beyond strictly sharing data in bulk, to a mindset in which we can take advantage of tools that allow us to analyze information, create actionable recommendations, and disseminate our findings to my officers in the field that have a critical need for it in real time.

This project couldn’t be more important as we strengthen our community and Charleston’s reputation as a world-class city. Continuing to improve public safety is among the most important factors influencing a person or businesses choice in where they live, work, or visit. And we want the world to see that Charleston is the best place to live, work and invest in their future.

The key to this will be our ability to compliment our police officers and other first responders with advanced technologies to integrate, collaborate and analyze information that has a meaningful impact on protecting our community.

In short, we have to be smarter about how we protect our residents. And this kind of project is critical to assisting us in being more effective crime fighters and problem-solvers.  It has allowed us to join the ranks of cutting-edge cities to gain a more accurate understanding of the data that is already at our disposal, which helps us detect patterns, be preemptive in our actions, and forecast critical information to prevent incidents.

 Follow the conversation on Twitter at #smartersafety.

Technorati Tags: Charleston, Gregory Mullen, IBM

Market forces are cooperating. Prices for solar panels are plummeting. But there remain some major impediments to solar adoption. All things considered, it’s still more expensive than traditional energy sources.

That’s where data analytics comes in. As part of the SMART NY, IBM is working with CUNY Ventures, a for-profit offshoot of the City University of New York, to create a system for gathering and analyzing information about the entire solar ecosystem within the city. The goal is to bring down the cost of installing solar.  “We’re looking to make solar competitive with other sources. We need to mainstream this technology to make it easy to adopt,” says Tria Case, CUNY’s director of sustainability and coordinator of  SMART NY.

New York became a player in solar energy when it launched its first long-term solar strategy in 2007. Since then, the amount of photovoltaic capacity installed has increased by a factor of 8, to 8.8 megawatts. That’s still a relatively small slice of the city’s energy supply, but it’s a start. Solar advocates believe the city could amass up to 70 megawatts of solar capacity in the next five years.

But for that to happen, the city has to help bring down the so-called “soft” costs. Those include financing, permitting and the incentives qualification process.

To achieve that goal, the city is using IBM’s Intelligent Operations Center software to monitor and analyze solar production and capacity and display the data on a dashboard of key indicators. The information will be drawn from the NYC Solar Portal, which is an inter-agency permitting and tracking tool; data collection systems in the city’s five solar empowerment zones, and the interactive NYC Solar Map, which businesses and citizens can use to size up their solar production potential and what it would cost to go solar. Case expects to be able to use insights gleaned from the dashboard to help streamline the permitting process and remove other barriers to adoption.

There’s an important role for citizens in this project–both as consumers of solar energy and as potential generators of energy not only for their own use but for selling back into the electrical grid. They can also provide feedback via the NYC Solar Map Web site.

The plan is to refine the monitoring and analytics system over the next year and then extend it to all of New York. Ultimately, CUNY Ventures and IBM hope to be able to package the technology and sell it as a service to other municipalities around the United States.

Now, that would be a sustainable approach to sustainability.

Technorati Tags: CUNY Ventures, IBM, NYC Solar City America, Tria Case

By Janet Perna
former General Manager, IBM Information Management

When I was a young math teacher fresh out of college in my hometown of Middletown, New York, I tried to make math entertaining and practical  for my students. I’d have them learn basic arithmetic by doing things like making change and dividing a sheet cake into equal servings.  They learned the basics of geometry by imagining that they were tiling the classroom floor. These exercises made math seem useful especially for those children who were not destined for college, but would become the backbone of the community taking on  blue collar jobs in Middletown.

Unfortunately, then and now, most children are turned off to math by the time they enter junior high school. I have found that  many elementary school teachers with whom I have spoken are intimidated by math, and aren’t confident enough to make it interesting and useful to their students. If teachers are afraid, the students will fear math, too. That’s why I believe that we need new programs to strengthen math skills and creativity in our university teacher education programs, and, even more broadly, in liberal arts curricula.

Click here to view the embedded video.

At my alma mater, the State University of New York at Oneonta, university President Dr. Nancy Kleniewski has been leading efforts to improve the climate for math and science. She worked with community leaders   to establish a  STEM Leadership Council that promotes science, technology, engineering and math in the region. She also took the lead in establishing The Fund for Science and Technology, which raised more than $5 million to enhance academic quality and establish scholarships in the university’s math and science programs. I served as co-chair of the campaign, along with Dr. William Pietraface, chairman of the SUNY Oneonta Biology Dept.

I’m particularly interested in encouraging young women to pursue majors and careers in math. I was one of only a handful of female math majors when I studied at Oneonta in the late 1960s. There were few girls in my advanced physics classes, as well. Male professors didn’t make us feel welcome. Still, I completed my studies and returned home to teach in Middletown, leaving a few years later for California, and, eventually, a long and fulfilling career at IBM.

When IBM hired me as a systems programmer, I had little knowledge of programming. I had taken a single college course, in Fortran. But IBM trained me to work in basic assembler language, which was used in mainframe computers.

Ever since the 1970s, with the rise of the computer industry and its impact on business and society, good software programmers have been in short supply. It was something I struggled with as I rose through the ranks as a manager and, ultimately, the executive in charge of IBM’s database and information management software products.

Today, the needs of society for people with math and science skills are even more acute. The explosion of data brought on by the Internet means we need people to design and use systems for gathering, managing and making sense of all of that information. Math algorithms are essential to so much of what we do.

Yet elementary school students are still intimidated by science and math, and, among college students, while about one-third of them major in science, engineering and math, many of those focus on the social sciences. Only about 1% of bachelors degrees are awarded in math and 3% are awarded in computer science, according to the National Science Foundation.

That’s not enough. We need more people with math and computer science skills if our economy is to remain globally competitive.

It’s incumbent on leaders in industry, government and academia to make the case for math. We have to draw direct connections between math skills and the good they can do in the world–by helping us improve health care, transportation, power distribution, energy exploration and many other fields.

I remember an instance when I was teaching math in Middletown and a father came in and told me that his son didn’t need to study math because the family owned a roller-skating rink. They would grow up to be skaters. I don’t know how he figured the kids would be able to keep the books. Clearly, he hadn’t made the connection between math and running a successful business.

We have to make those connections–for the sake of our children and our country.

Technorati Tags: Charles and Ray Eames, IBM, Janet Perna, Mathematica

Frustration with “information overload” is one of the facts of life these days. For many people, the deluge of information they’re confronted with every day at work, on TV, on the Internet, and, increasingly, on mobile phones and tablet PCs too often seems like a burden that has to be overcome rather than a benefit.

It doesn’t have to be so. At IBM, we believe the super-abundance of information, often called “Big Data,” should be thought of as nothing less than a tremendous new natural resource. In fact, information is becoming the petroleum of the 21^st century. But we need a new generation of analytics technology and expertise to help us make the most of it.

Today, at events in New York and London called the Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit, we’re talking with 100 business leaders about the potential for harvesting this great resource to create value for their businesses and for society.

Editor’s note: In addition, we want to open the conversation to many more people via the A Smarter Planet blog and Twitter, at #SmarterAnalytics and #Big Data. For the video simulcast, click here.

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What exactly is Big Data? It’s a product of the Internet combined with all the new ways that are emerging to gather, discover and make sense of data. For years, business people collected information in relational databases—made up of tabular columns and rows. Then came the Internet and search engines that help us find just the nuggets of information we want on millions of Web pages. Now, add to that all the data that can be collected from the Internet of Things—tens of millions of sensors that gather everything from the vital signs of babies in ICUs to the currents at the bottom of the ocean to location data gathered from millions of smartphones.

Add it all up and we humans are creating fifteen petabytes of new information every day—about eight times the information housed in all the academic libraries in the United States.

The promise of Big Data is truly mind-boggling. If we can harvest insights from all of those sources of information, rather than being overwhelmed by data, we have the capacity to understand with greater precision than ever before how our world actually works. By applying analysis to data, we can see once-hidden patterns unfolding before our eyes so we can make better decisions about everything from personal financial planning to a company’s strategic direction. We can accurately predict what will happen if we make one decision rather than another. And we can meld together streams of information coming from many different sources, and, often in real time, decide how best to respond to sudden changes.

The way the city of Rio de Janeiro is dealing with its wild weather shows the value of Big Data. The city is beset by frequent violent storms, which cause destructive floods and landslides on its many heavily-populated hillsides. IBM is helping the city predict the weather with 80% accuracy down to the block level, and up to 48 hours in advance. Armed with advance warning, city managers can prepare for the worst. The technology that makes this possible is Deep Thunder, an application developed by IBM Research that uses high-performance computing, math algorithms and a combination of topographical data, information gathered from 33 rain gauges scattered across the city and global weather data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.

Drawing insights from  Big Data is technically challenging. It can’t be done with a desktop software application. To deal with those challenges, IBM is developing new capabilities for information management and analysis. We have spent more than $14 billion since 2005 acquiring analytics companies, including market leaders Cognos, SPSS and Coremetrics. We also created a business analytics practice within our IBM Global Business Services—which now has thousands of consultants. We’ve learned from more than 20,000 analytics engagements with clients.

One of the important lessons we’ve learned is that, in Big Data analytics, one size doesn’t fit all. So we’re developing what we call Signature Solutions to help businesses take on some of their most critical needs. These solutions are tailor made to handle a particular problem or business opportunity. Our first targets are fraud detection, consumer intelligence and corporate financial operations analysis. Each solution is a combination of software capabilities and consulting expertise.

The era of Big Data has arrived. The implications are huge. So are the technical and organizational challenges. But, in partnership with our clients, we hope to deliver on the immense potential of Big Data for making businesses, the global economy and society work better.

For more information:

 Big Data, Analytics, and the Path from Insights to Value, published in the MIT Sloan Management Review.

Outperforming in a Data-Rich, Hyper-Connected World, published by the IBM Center for Applied Insights.

Some coverage:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/252187/ibm_unveils_new_analysis_packages.html

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/232602850?cid=InformationWeek-Twitter

http://servicesangle.com/blog/2012/03/20/new-ibm-analytics-package-comes-with-9000-consultants-stirring-the-cauldron/

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/IBM-Launches-New-Predictive-Analytics-Software-and-Services-252193/

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, IBM, Steve Mills

Click here to view the embedded video.

Think of the IOC as an operating system for cities.  IBM scientists, engineers and consultants fashioned the IOC by incorporating the lessons they learned about how cities work and how to use technology to make them work better. These lessons came from engagements with New York City, Stockholm, Singapore, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and other places. The IOC platform integrates streams of data from many sources, public and private. The developers are making specialized software application modules that click into place in the IOC platform like Legos—starting with transportation, which is being used in Zhenjiang.

Leaders in Zhenjiang, which has a population of 3 million, realized that the city could not continue to grow rapidly and remain an attractive tourist destination. So they decided to come to grips with growth before it does real damage to the quality of life.

The plan is to make over the city’s public transportation system and steer traffic more efficiently. Using data gathered from sensors, video cameras, satellite images, the IOC will provide a comprehensive, real-time picture of the city’s transportation network. City managers will be able to anticipate traffic problems and reroute vehicles using programmable traffic lights and other signals. They’re also using the data to optimize the schedules for 1,000 buses serving 400 bus stations. Technology from IBM Research provides the predictive analytics that will make it possible for managers to anticipate problems and avoid them.

One of the key elements of making cities smarter is being able to recognize patterns that are common to boomtowns in Asia, industrial cities in the American midwest or cultural capitals of Europe. Once you spot the commonalities, you can design expert systems for managing those aspects of cities. The IOC software is a major (yet still early) step along the path to providing cities with affordable technology that will help them transform the way operate.

Here’s the story of Rio’s intelligent operations center:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Intelligent Operations Center, Zhenjiang