Karen Parrish, Vice President, Industry Solutions, IBM

By Karen Parrish

This week, professionals from around the world are attending eHealthWeek to discuss trends, innovations and solutions to address the ongoing challenges in healthcare. There certainly won’t be a lack of data and discussion about cost, wellness, aging populations and dealing with chronic conditions. While there are plenty of opinions, what’s missing from this deluge of points of view is a holistic approach to meeting needs of individuals – an approach IBM calls Smarter Care.

We’ve known for decades that health and social systems are interdependent and have a critical impact on each other. Yet the complex matrix of public and private stakeholders in the health and well-being of citizens still operate largely within silos, providing separate and disparate care. 

For example, does your grandmother’s home health aide understand the new therapy prescribed to her? Does the social services worker have insight into the medical issues behind her disability? Does the social security office understand how her benefits should be determined at this stage in her life? Does the pharmacist down the street realize that her doctor just gave her a sample for a new blood thinner that may interact with her other medications?  While these caregivers, agencies and social services support organizations all have her well-being in mind, many times – not necessarily to any fault of their own – they lack insight and collaboration to see the bigger picture.

The promise of Smarter Care is that the health and well-being of an individual can be mapped out over a lifetime, helping him or her make informed decisions and just as importantly, aiding the healthcare and social services ecosystem to know what to do. At each state of an individual’s life, the end goal is to know when to incorporate preventive care, thereby lowering risks and everyone’s costs. The result: healthier and more prosperous citizens and communities.

So how do we get to Smarter Care? With access to unprecedented amounts of Big Data, forward- looking organizations and governments are creating new opportunities to observe, analyze and coordinate the interconnections between social determinants, clinical factors and lifestyle choices.

Take the case of Catalonia, Spain. Sixty percent of its population over 65 has chronic diseases and consumes 70 percent of the region’s healthcare resources. Through a pilot program, the Catalan Institute of Health is working closely with the Catalonian government to tackle the problem through a more coordinated chronic disease management process. The organizations are pulling together information that previously resided in more than 20 databases and many custom and commercial applications to provide a holistic view of each patient.

In the Region of Southern Denmark (RSD), 22 percent of the citizens suffer from some form of a chronic illness, including about 70,000 who suffer from heart disease. To combat this problem, RSD is launching a pilot program with IBM to facilitate real-time communication among patients, physicians, pharmacists, mental health professionals and specialists so all parties have insight into patient care plans.

Smarter Care is a new way of thinking for private and public sector organizations. It delivers on the promise of holistic and individualized care, focusing on people, not programs. This is our opportunity to help address quality, costs and outcomes, and drive individual wellness and community vitality.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, healthcare, holistic care, IBM Smarter Planet, patient care, Smarter Healthcare

Vince Ward, Project Officer at the Southern Housing Group

By Vince Ward

What started out as a community-based energy project on the Isle of Wight has morphed into a bona fide social movement.

Encouraged by the work of IBM Distinguished Engineer, Andy Stanford-Clark, who created a “smart” house that monitored, managed and optimized energy use, three years ago the Village of Chale created the Chale Community Project, which seeks, among other things, to reduce home energy costs by up to 50 percent. While the project has indeed raised awareness and helped residents lower costs, it has also had a serendipitous outcome – it has brought the community together.

From the very beginning of the Chale Community Project – during planning and roll-out phases – we worked on ensuring the local community was on board. Going from door to door, the team would communicate with residents about the plan of action, encourage participation and try to boost morale.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With confidence growing we continued by introducing schemes that would improve quality of life for the village. Local residents embraced the training schemes we provided on renewable technologies which not only offered new skills but opened up employment opportunities in areas previously unavailable. The schemes also benefited other parts of the island as residents could now act as ‘local green champions’ to educate other villages that were developing plans to become more sustainable.

These successful early activities encouraged the village to grab hold of the project and take it further. For example, local resident Peter Atkinson now manages a new data centre filled with computers donated from a local school that had closed. The computers are being used to train residents in core IT skills to help them use the Internet to pay bills and access online Government information. Atkinson believes that around 50 percent of the village is without Internet access in their homes, so the project has made a massive difference to people’s lives in that respect.

These activities have provided a solid foundation from which we built and expanded our sustainability project.  In addition to the aforementioned, the team has:

• Persuaded the local transport company to halve bus fares to encourage the use of public transportation for residents
• Seen a dramatic drop in rent arrears as energy monitoring has made utility bills more manageable; some residents have reported reductions of up to 50 percent
• Created an allotment area in the village, where young and old residents are brought together to reinforce a new sense of community spirit

Planning For The Future

Though we have achieved so much so far, we still have a lot of plans for the future.

For example, we are very excited to be the first village on the island working on a roll out of SMART meters that will replace electricity meters.

Additionally, we are talking to residents about launching a new electric vehicle project in the village which establishes clusters of electric vehicles (EV) to mimic a future network. If residents take part, we will offer the use of a brand new electric vehicle at a discounted rate for an 18-month trial period and install an EV charging point free of charge for each trial participant.

For us, the emphasis in all of these activities is on the community helping itself to live more sustainably. That is why we are pleased to be working with IBM to support the Business in the Community’s Start campaign called Be the Start. Start is an initiative inspired by HRH The Prince of Wales and the campaign is running throughout May with over 40 brands and organisations inspiring people to live sustainably by demonstrating how it can be rewarding and meaningful.

On 14 May IBM will bring sustainable living to life with a Chale focus on www.smartertrends.co.uk. IBM supported the installation of energy monitoring technology in the village which helped save energy and water so I’ll be hosting a Twitter chat with Andy Stanford-Clark on 14 May at 10:00AM ET to provide insights and top tips. So please come and join us by following @smartertrends or #IBMChale to find out more about the Chale Community Project.

Technorati Tags: Andy Stanford-Clark, Big Data, environmental stewardship, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Isle of Wight, smarter analytics, Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, sustainability

Alfred Vanderpuije, Mayor of Accra, Ghana

By Alfred Vanderpuije

This week at the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, leaders will come together to discuss Africa’s future. One of the three focus themes is the importance of ‘Strategic Infrastructure’ as a foundation for the continent’s growth. As Mayor of Accra and Chief Executive of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, I would say that there are few areas as crucial for infrastructure investment as cities.

Buoyed by an emerging oil and gas industry and a rapidly growing consumer class, Ghana’s economy is one of the fastest growing in the world. Investors are flocking to the country’s capital Accra to take advantage of new business opportunities and become part of this success story. Mastercard recently identified Accra as one of Africa’s top cities in terms of economic growth potential over the next few years. Local and foreign firms are also driving a number of urban development opportunities such as Ghana Cyber City, King City and Appolonia City which aim to set up modern, high-tech hubs within and around Accra.

I welcome these initiatives, however, at the top of my agenda is Accra itself and the transformation of its existing systems and services for the benefit of its citizens and businesses. The truth is we cannot look to Accra’s future opportunities, without looking into the challenges of today.

Accra’s existing infrastructure is being put under increasing strain by an influx of new residents – the city’s population has expanded by over 1 million people – a 35 percent increase in the past decade alone. As we cannot, and will not, put a wall around the city to restrict the arrival of new residents, we can expect this trend to continue.

We must therefore act today to ensure that the city’s systems – from transportation, to water, sanitation, energy, healthcare, public safety, education and administration – are able to accommodate and cope with this influx of new residents.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For instance, today nearly all transportation in Accra is by road, but 70 percent of the vehicles carry only 30 percent of the people – a trend which causes significant traffic jams during peak hours.

Accra also suffers from perennial flooding problems and in 2011 there was extensive loss of life due to flash floods within the city. These problems highlight the extensive modernization required to our sanitation and storm water systems.

At the heart of many of these problems is our inability to finance projects to maintain and transform Accra. The reality is, my Metropolitan Assembly struggles to raise enough revenue for city services due to out-of-date revenue collection systems, tax evasion and fraud.

The government of Ghana and the Accra Metropolitan Assembly are already taking steps to address these challenges. Recently, Ghana’s President, John Dramani Mahama, launched the National Urban Policy Framework and Action Plan to promote the sustainable development of Ghanaian cities and towns. In Accra, we have put in place the Millennium Cities Initiative to raise the standard of living and we are beginning the transformation of many of the city’s systems. The Accra Sanitary Sewer and Storm Water Drainage Alleviation Project, supported by the U.S. government, also stands to improve waste water treatment for the city’s four million residents.

We recognize we cannot do this work alone. We need to tap into expertise and experience from across public and private sectors and civil society, within Ghana and around the world. We also recognize that the infrastructure we are currently installing has to be designed to withstand the challenges of tomorrow. We must therefore turn to the latest technologies to ensure that our systems are optimized and smarter.

IBM recently offered its expertise to the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to help tackle some of the city’s most intractable problems. A team of IBM experts travelled to Accra last year to work alongside our own. Just last week the company presented me with a report which outlines some of the key challenges and possible solutions in areas such as transportation, city services and energy. I also met with Dr. Kamal Bhattacharya, Director of IBM Research-Africa who presented some interesting new solutions specially designed for Africa. 

We see great opportunity for technology in Accra. For example, in the area of revenue collection, we see potential to use mobile payment systems to enable citizens and small businesses to pay for their taxes and city services electronically. Once payment systems are digitized, it will become a lot easier for my administration to identify cases of tax underpayment or fraud.

In the area of transportation, we could also turn to mobile phone data to help us to understand how Accra’s residents move around the city and how we could use that data to enhance our transportation systems to avoid traffic bottlenecks and traffic jams. We have a number of mobile service providers active in Ghana who could act as partners for such work.

In the area of water and sanitation, we could use technology to help monitor and manage our drainage systems and predict possible cases of flooding.

Technology holds great potential in Accra. However, we also recognize that what makes a city safer and smarter are its people. We need to forge a better relationship with our citizens and increase their sense of responsibility for their city. Accra’s residents need to take an interest in caring for the city. Nearly every one of our residents has a mobile phone – this creates the perfect channel for reporting problems and threats to the city’s infrastructure.

Across Africa, cities are growing quickly – economically and demographically. In Accra we need to embrace technologies and show leadership to ensure that our city is not left behind.

Technorati Tags: africa, Big Data, Ghana, IBM Smarter Planet, mobile computing, smarter analytics, Smarter Transportation, WEF 2013

Deepak Advani, General Manager, Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure, IBM

By Deepak Advani

The Internet Age has made it possible for dramatic amounts of information to be available at our fingertips. And as capacity expands and accessibility grows, we push ever closer to the  Internet-of-things, where our physical and digital worlds are tightly coupled and leveraged.

With the ability to generate, share, store and access increasing amounts of data – Big Data – the challenge soon becomes one of management and analysis. Left alone, the mountains of seemingly disparate information are useless. But when mined intelligently, they become treasure troves of insight that can unlock benefits, such as improved customer service, equipment-saving predictive maintenance, and new business opportunities, to name a few.

Take for example, the second largest commodity rail carrier in the European Union, PKP Cargo. The company manages 63,000 wagons and 2,400 locomotives that transport more than 110 million tons of cargo every year. PKP Cargo offers one-stop logistical services that include 10 multi-system locomotives, ensuring continuous journeys along routes electrified by more than one system. These trains and wagons are used for international transport in Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria and Belgium. On average, the company runs about 1,000 trains a day, servicing several thousand customers.

The amount of data being generated and needing to be tracked was difficult for PKP to sift through. The company realized it wasn’t just the task of tracking their wagons and trains that was vexing; it was the lack of analytics that it could turn into actionable information. Through IBM Maximo Asset Management software, PKP can now better predict when and where cargo will arrive, making sure each train is on schedule and meeting customer expectations. Just as important as tracking their assets, analytics empowers more than 10,000 of PKP’s employees with information to make more intelligent decisions, which ultimately enables PKP to expand its business. By also tracking the usage of each physical asset, PKP is using IBM analytics to predict potential repairs before failures occur and to perform preventative maintenance on its rolling stock.

PKP’s use of analytics is not uncommon and neither is the concept of gleaning intelligence from data to create new opportunities. Consider Pakistan. The country is quickly outpacing its current power generation capacity, with energy consumption growing by almost 80 percent in the last 15 years. The Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) forecasts the country’s electricity demand will increase to around 40,000 megawatts (MW) by 2020. The country’s current power generation capacity is at 23,538 MW.

To meet these growing demands, Pakistan created its first hydroelectric power plant through its operator, Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB) Remaco. The recently-constructed $235 million plant will help meet Pakistan’s growing energy needs by adding an estimated net annual energy of 540 GWh to the national grid and enhance the hydro power generation capacity of Independent Power Producers (IPP) by 40 percent. The addition of this power source will replace about 135,000 tons of imported oil, reducing carbon emissions and saving Pakistan approximately US$100 million per year in fuel costs.

The inherent challenge, however, was managing the hydro plant operations in a way that could scale to meet business demands. Through IBM’s asset management software, TNB Remaco now employs a single, converged view of all energy data, as well as asset and service management data. That enables employees to identify problematic equipment and make better informed decisions that are critical to the operations of the plant

The moving parts of a hydroelectric plant or railroad system serve as good examples of how our world is dependent on the mechanics and operations of physical objects. But today, we can do more than just monitor these systems and machines. We can collect data from them and apply analytics to make better, more strategic decisions on how to use them. The next step will be finding ways to create “cognitive” systems that can learn, adapt and hypothesize answers.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, PKP Cargo, smarter analytics, Smarter Transportation, smarter utilities

Mike King, Vice President, Global Education Industry, IBM

By Mike King

The age of the heavy textbook-filled backpacks and printed syllabi is coming to an end.

It’s self-evident that the higher education marketplace has been transitioning to digital content and collaborative learning programs for years. Up until recently, much of this evolution has been laptop based, but today the landscape is migrating to tablets and mobile devices. In fact, most campuses now assume, and plan for, multiple devices per-user when considering bandwidth needs for campus-wide WiFi access.

But it’s not just colleges and universities. K-12 schools are moving quickly to digital learning delivery programs, as well, due in large part to the increasing adoption of tablets and new programs designed to leverage those systems. In the U.S., the Race to the Top Assessment program will essentially mandate online testing for all students by 2015. Many districts are implementing tablet programs before then. Los Angeles Unified has announced a tablet program for “one to one” computing (ratio of device to student), and many other major districts, including New York City, Houston, and Gwinnett County, Ga., have similar projects in the works.

 Several countries have also announced similar programs for their K-12 students, such as the multi-billion dollar Fatih program in Turkey and Thailand’s One Tablet Per Child (OTPC) policy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While the consumer market is good at creating “walled gardens” that corner us into using services that are unique to specific devices, institutions of learning shouldn’t follow suit. Savvy educators should work to build open environments that let content and services flow freely across a variety of devices. Doing so will be critical to supporting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) models that is becoming more common in schools and corporations, alike.

To be sure, in academia as it is in the enterprise, locking into a single tool or platform and training employees on proprietary infrastructures is limiting and costly. But potentially more detrimental from an educator’s standpoint, such practices can start confining the educational content and ultimately stifle the learning process itself.

IBM’s MobileFirst portfolio of mobile solutions, for example, deepens our Smarter Education capabilities. For instance, our partnership with Desire2Learn (D2L), a leading learning management system company, brings almost a hundred curriculum publishers into the classroom. D2L’s Binder app puts that content onto multiple tablets and creates an open environment that fosters academic collaboration and thereby, success.

Approaches that leverage data and insights that inform and align with content, as well as support a variety of devices, like IBM’s Smarter Education solutions, can deliver personalized learning. Such support enables broad choice in the classroom, but also a consistent focus on improving outcomes for students.

Success in the education space is measured not in apps, but in graduates and in shrinking the widening skills gap. To achieve this, the industry must focus on the student and not on the device. To do that, it must create open models for access, promote learning, and enable any curricular content to be supported on any device.

Technorati Tags: digital learning, IBM MobileFirst, IBM Smarter Cities, IBM Smarter Education, IBM Smarter Planet, mobile computing, mobile enterprise, Smarter Education, smarter mobile computing

David McQueeney, Vice President, Technical Strategy and Worldwide Operations, IBM

By David McQueeney

Five years ago, IBM launched its Smarter Planet initiative, describing the era in which we currently live and operate in as the “Era of Smart,” one marked by forward-thinking leaders in business, government and society capitalizing on smarter systems to achieve economic growth, operational efficiency and sustainable development.

Since 2008, we have moved beyond the world of programmable systems to our first steps in cognitive systems – systems that exploit large data sources and can “learn.” Our Watson system may highlight this new way of operating best. For the first time, a computer has the ability to consult a broad range of human language resources, learn from historical training data, and answer surprisingly complex questions. We are forced to rethink how computers can work with humans on complex tasks, by showing the world a system that is able to respond based on what it ‘knows’ –  facts and information and training – rather than simply what words match in a simple search.

(Third in a series in support of Big Data Week.)

The Era of Smart helps to drive economic growth and today IBM brought that message to Congress in a hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Science Committee’s Research and Technology subcommittees.

As Big Data and analytics continue to touch every single industry – from energy and healthcare to transportation and banking – it’s critical that the public and private sectors work together to ensure we are leveraging these new technologies to transform society and support economic competitiveness.

Data created from the beginning of time up until 2003 is comparable to the amount of data that will be created in just two days during 2013. In fact, it is estimated that by 2015, 2 million IT jobs will be created in the U.S. to help tackle the slew of data and transform it into actionable information. As the world continues to generate more and more structured and unstructured data, the need for skilled workers who can apply analytics to Big Data will continue to grow exponentially.

At the hearing, I stressed the importance of creating a new workforce, which includes support for skills development, as well as increased research in system design and software development.

Here at IBM, we’ve witnessed firsthand the power and necessity behind this new imperative for skills development and training. The IBM Academic Initiative, a program designed to supply institutions with essential training software and hardware, has added 6,000 universities and 30,000 faculty members to its program in just the past seven years. We now have in place more than 300 academic partnerships with some of the nation’s leading institutions.

Last month, IBM announced a partnership with the City of Baton Rouge and LouisianaStateUniversity. Over the next 10 years, we will work with LSU academics to develop a physical center and curriculum that will train computer science students in the application of analytics. The result is a projected 800 new jobs created in the Baton Rouge area to supply the demand for this smarter workforce.

And just today, IBM announced a new academic partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to offer a graduate degree program beginning in the 2013 Fall semester. The new Master of Science in Business Analytics program is designed to develop data application and analytic skills to the future workforce.

Yet, more can – and should – be done. IBM supports legislation that will drive an agenda around skills and research, like the Department of Energy’s High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004. The legislation would improve high-end computing and research, as well as strengthen government and industry partnerships. We also support the reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Act and the Federal Work Study Program, to help students master the Big Data and analytic skills needed to compete in the global marketplace.

A stronger and smarter workforce equipped with advanced computing skills will have the tools to seize the future. With data now at all of our fingertips, we have the ability to create a planet that is the best it can be, and together with our government partners, we can continue to build a smarter planet.

___________________________________

Other stories in this series:

• Big Data Takes Flight in Aviation, by Thomas J. Wholey
• Rensselaer’s New Analytics Degree to Help Organizations Better Tackle Big Data, by T. Ravichandran

Technorati Tags: Big Data analytics, IBM Research, IBM Smarter Planet, information technology, innovation, IT skills, research, skills, smarter analytics, U.S. House of Representatives

By Ernie Connon, Vice President Worldwide, Health and Human Services Industry Solutions, IBM

By Ernie Connon

“Great moments are born from great opportunity.”

So, said Herb Brooks, the legendary coach of the 1980 U.S. Men’s Olympic hockey team before its miraculous win over the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y.

Today, Health and Human Services Departments in every state face a “great opportunity” to reshape how they deliver vital health and social services to citizens.

While it would be easy to look at this moment of an evolving healthcare and social services environment as simply a mandate to change , forward-looking leaders see opportunities for bold transformations in how they manage and deliver programs such as Medicaid. These leaders maximize existing technology investments, empower caseworkers to focus more on individuals and families, and evolve operations to meet tomorrow’s challenges.  

In many states, the reality surrounding these social services programs are legacy systems with information silos and data residing in multiple locations. Imagine the impact on the citizen who has had a life-changing event and wants to simply learn what benefits he or she is eligible for. Due to system complexities and information silos, it is estimated that $65 billion in benefits for low income families goes unclaimed each year.

Needless to say, that creates a stressful situation and one in which a maze of forms and contact information can be quite intimidating. And imagine the challenge for the caseworker who lacks a single full-picture view of an individual’s or family’s situation. And then multiply this by each and every case worker.

Two forward-looking CIOs from Arkansas and South Carolina are moving away from the status quo of building new silos and turning to smarter approaches.

“We are transforming an IT infrastructure that is composed of more than 30 discrete system silos in an aging architecture,” said Dick Wyatt, chief information officer for the Arkansas Department of Human Services (DHS).

The Arkansas DHS has more than 7,500 employees working throughout the state and in 85 county offices. Serving more than 1.4 million people each year, including infants, children, adults, people with disabilities and the elderly, the agency also promotes volunteerism, funds community programs, regulates nursing homes, licenses daycares and finds foster children permanent families.

Working with an IBM Smarter Cities solution, Arkansas DHS is bringing one view of their clients in one application, providing citizens with a single point of access in determining eligibility for programs they may not be aware of.  In turn, DHS can react in a more timely and efficient fashion.

For John Supra, deputy director & chief information officer for the South Carolina Department of Health & Human Services (SCDHHS), the choice focused on citizen-centric services. “Our updated Medicaid eligibility system will make it easier for all South Carolinians to access the State’s programs,” said John Supra, deputy director & chief information officer for SCDHHS. “Our current manual paper-driven approach limits flexibility in our processes and impacts speed and consistency. We expect the new system to provide us a platform to improve our eligibility performance and be able to more quickly and cost-effectively respond to future changes to the Medicaid programs.”

SCDHHS provides healthcare benefits to more than 1.1 million South Carolinians. The agency’s transformation with an IBM Smarter Cities solution will help the state manage its Big Data challenges in migrating from a largely paper-based approach to a more open, automated platform to manage eligibility requirements and also integrate with a federal health insurance marketplace.

Arkansas and South Carolina follow the example of Utah. With IBM, the state improved accuracy by integrating six systems to show eligibility for 2,000 programs. They saw an increase of 50 percent more citizens served without additional costs to taxpayers — by reducing errors and simplifying process.

These states are relying on IBM Curam software, part of IBM’s Smarter Cities portfolio that focuses on helping cities and governments do more with less and/or existing resources. These capabilities help governments meet their objectives and, more importantly, make access to services easier, improving care and quality of life for their citizens.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, CIO, Curam, IBM Smarter Planet, smarter analytics, social services

Mitzie Hunter, CEO, Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance

By Mitzie Hunter

Like many city-dwellers worldwide, residents of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) have reached an impasse. Our congestion problems are getting worse and worse, and we now have some of the longest commuting times in North America. Congestion is not only taking a toll on our economy and our environment, but also on our health and our quality of life.

IBM’s Social Sentiment Index research pulled tens of thousands of tweets about traffic from five major cities across Canada. The exercise homed in on what our residents feel is most important—not surprisingly, Toronto’s commuters were the most active to vent their opinions. Toronto had 10,000 tweets about traffic over an 11-month period, 40 percent of which were explicitly negative. By contrast, only 20 percent of tweets in Halifax were negative.

In the GTHA, through CivicAction’s Your32 campaign, we’ve been reaching out to all commuters—drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, and transit users—to learn what a better transportation system would mean to them. We’ve been driving people to our website, your32.com, and to twitter, and asking a simple question: “What would you do with 32?” Thirty-two represents the number of minutes, on average, commuters in the region will save if the approved transportation plan, The Big Move, is funded and built over the next 25 years. The Big Move is the region’s plan for an improved, fully connected transportation system across the GTHA.

Through their responses, people have been painting a picture of the human cost of congestion—the toll congestion is taking on our lives by sucking away the time we could otherwise be spending on the things that matter. Things like eating healthy meals, going to the gym, or spending time with our families.

But we’re also finding that people are inspired by the idea of what a better system could bring: time to finish that novel they’ve been working on for years, to learn a new language, to take on a new hobby, or to explore more of what our amazing region has to offer.

When it comes to solving our congestion problems, smarter transportation is part of the solution. Employers can play their part by offering staff incentives for carpooling and taking transit, or by being open to flexible hours and telecommuting.  Smart commute networks can also help employers promote smarter commuting choices. New technologies and demand management mechanisms, from computer modeling, to crowd-sourcing, to intelligent traffic lights must also play a role – and we’re sure to see new and exciting innovations in the decades to come to maximize our road capacity and our transit system.

Many cities are exploring these opportunities now. But while these technologies can play a role in solving our congestion woes, what we need more than anything is better physical infrastructure. Transportation infrastructure in Canadian cities—and especially in the GTHA—has been chronically underfunded for decades. We’ve far exceeded the capacity of our current network, and with the estimated nearly three million people—a population the size of greater Montreal—moving into the GTHA over the next 25 years, things will only get worse. Unless we start building now  the upgraded, expanded, multimodal system that we need to make up for lost time and to plan for the future.

Fixing any city’s congestion crisis won’t happen overnight; it will take time, money and commitment to make up for decades of neglect and delay. But the need to act has never been so clear, and the cost of inaction has never been so high.

As we act, we should be guided by an overriding vision of smarter networks that better connect us to the places we want to go, and that provide us with more choice in how we get there. New technologies and attitudinal changes are part of the answer, but unless the public and decision-makers accept that we all have to pay for a better system, to build the new infrastructure that we need, the human cost of congestion will affect us for generations to come. While we continue to innovate and design a better future, it’s time to get moving on building The Big Move.

Join the conversation in the GTHA: visit your32.com, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, Crowd Sourcing, IBM Smarter Planet, IBM Smarter Transportation, IBM Social Sentiment Index, innovation, smarter analytics, smarter traffic, social media, social sentiment, Toronto

Eoin Lane, IBM Smarter Water Architect

By Eoin Lane

People often say that water is the new oil, but really, it’s not. Oil is a fossil fuel that takes millions of years and a lot of pressure to create. When we burn oil – for example, by driving our cars – it is gone forever (or at least for a few more millions of years before it can be created again!).

Water, on the other hand, cannot be created or destroyed (this is not strictly true, but bear with me). The same amount of water is around today that was around when the Earth was formed. The truth is there is a lot of water on Earth – just not a lot of drinking water.

Here are some facts about just how little drinkable water is available:

* 97.5 percent of all water on Earth is salt water, leaving only 2.5 percent as fresh water
* Of that fresh water, nearly 70 percent is locked in ice
* Most of the rest of that freshwater is in aquifers which we are draining much more quickly than the natural recharge rate
* Two-thirds of our freshwater is used to grow food
* With 83 million more people on Earth each year, water demand will keep going up unless we change how we use it.[1]

Margaret Catley-Carlson of the Global Water Partnership has said, ”We cannot create water, but we can manage it better, much better.” [2] Take, for example, the longest water tunnel supplying NYC: it is 85 miles long, and it leaks 35 million gallons of water every day. We need to become much smarter about how we manage this precious resource and about how we collect, analyze and use water data.

There are three ways we can become smarter about water management:  Instrumentation, Big Data analytics, and cooperation.

Instrumentation involves smart meters and sensors that take digital readings (pressure, flow etc.) and stores them in a database. The combination of smart meter data and GPS location data allows for rich visualization of the information. On top of this we can also display water pipe information, asset information (such as manholes, pumps, and work orders), as well as customer information. We can be smart about this and organize all of the information using a semantic model. For now, think of a semantic model as a flexible model that allows us to connect information from different sources, for example, one that allows the water utility operator to determine what pipes are associated with which customers.

Big Data analytics can then be applied to the data collected through instrumentation. We can classify analytics into three broad categories:

•  Descriptive analytics (finding patterns in things that happened in the past)
•  Prescriptive or optimization analytics (the math of making things better in the present)
•  Predictive analytics (foretelling the future)

Let’s look at concrete examples of these, as applied to an instrumented water system.

To understand the power of descriptive analytics, watch the movie Moneyball. Moneyball tells the story of a poor baseball team that takes a sophisticated descriptive analytics approach and wins 20 consecutive games. The same kind of descriptive analytics can be applied to water assets such as pipes, pumps, etc. Descriptive analytics could allow a water utility to pinpoint leaky water pipes down to a particular type of pipe that’s manufactured by a local company.

For prescriptive or optimization analytics, let’s travel to Europe. I come from a town in southern Ireland called Cork, and a couple of years ago I was walking home when I met some water utility workers making holes in the road. After chatting with them, I learned that the holes in the road were for acoustic sensors, which use sound to locate leaks. I also found out that the pipe networks were very old, and nobody knew where the pipes really were. But they did know they were leaking very badly. This story is echoed across many European cities and towns, and indeed, around the world.

One of the major contributing factors to these leaks is the water pressure in the pipes, which is kept high to ensure good pressure on the tap side. However, analytics can help here. We can run optimization analytics on the pressure reading data across the network to optimize the pressure in the network. This optimization will still maintain good pressure on the tap side, but bring down the overall pressure in the water network. Long term, this will reduce wear and tear on the pipes, and as a consequence reduce the leaks.

Lastly, predictive analytics can provide water utilities with information about when leaks or failures (pumps, pipes, sensors, meters, etc.) are likely to occur.

The theme of World Water Day 2013 is the International Year of Water Cooperation. Instrumentation and Big Data analytics are truly the foundation for cooperation about water management. Getting back to our Moneyball analogy, analytics enabled the Oakland A’s to build a better baseball team, for less money, but team players still had to cooperate and play as a team in order to win. Citizens and corporations, alike, must also cooperate when it comes to smarter water management.

In some communities such as Dubuque, Iowa, citizens use online water conservation portals to gain a better understanding of their water usage. They can also compare their water use with other similar local households. Here we are seeing cooperation between the citizens and the water utility company. Citizens can also collaborate by becoming the collective “eyes” of the water utility. This allows for authorities to get up-to-the-minute information on the state of the water infrastructure and prioritize fixing these problems. Check out the WaterWatcher initiative in South Africa.

I believe we can manage our water better by making our water networks smarter and by encouraging cooperation.

I’ll be on a live Facebook chat today, to discuss how technology can help conserve water. Please join me.

But before I go, I will leave you with a few more sobering facts about how we currently use water:

Americans use about 100 gallons of water at home every day * Millions of the world’s poorest subsist on fewer than five gallons per day * 46 percent of the people on Earth do not have water piped to their homes * Women in developing countries walk an average of 3.7 miles daily to get water * In 15 years 1.8 billon people (a third of the world’s current population) will live in regions of severe water scarcity [1]

_______________________________________________________________

1. National Geographic – Water Our Thirsty World

2. The Atlas of Water – Maggie Black et al.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, IBM Smarter Planet, smarter analytics, smarter utilities, Smarter Water, smarter water management, utilities, water management

George Elliott, P. Eng., Commissioner of Transportation and Public Works, City of Cambridge, Ontario

By George Elliott, P. Eng.

In the city of Cambridge, Ontario, we’ve always taken pride in our long and proud tradition of delivering quality services to our citizens with the bottom line in mind. We know that with a growing city, our infrastructure needs are also growing. In these hard economic times, we wanted to address funding gaps through efficiencies and limit the impact on taxes. We looked for ways to give us more analytical ability to refine and enhance our systems and gain greater return on investment.

Given the aging physical infrastructure challenges that all Canadian municipalities are facing, we needed to better understand the competing priorities, and look to refine ways we address our infrastructure to avoid costly repairs.

Our team was challenged with addressing preventative maintenance as most of our resources were being increasingly used to respond to emergency repairs. 

We needed the ability to put resources to proactive programs to start to get ahead of the curve. Through ongoing work in asset management and technology implementation, we’ve uncovered the insights needed to shift to a preventative maintenance model – to begin the shift away from a break-fix mentality of operations and embrace a more proactive approach to maintenance. We are gaining more efficiencies and developing a plan for long-term infrastructure sustainability. 

The technology helped quantify the extent of reactive activities and the resources we used for these emergencies to free up time for prevention. In turn, that prompted change at both Capital Re-construction Planning and day-to-day operations and, in some cases, we could refocus on repair techniques in the field.  We can drill down into the data and create automated, detailed workflow plans that cover all activities that are performed.

For example, by knowing that major infrastructure in the ground is due for renewal, we can better coordinate repaving work so that part of the city isn’t dug up several times – it’s about greater coordination and reducing the impact on our citizens. Effectively we’ve achieved a symbiotic trend reversal developed through collaboration – all starting with the insight gained from analytics.

These analytics touch everything we do and allow us to make more informed decisions – we think differently about how maintenance is done, which is the key to our success going forward. These analytics will also support our city leaders’ decisions to invest in infrastructure and help us to make wiser decisions for future stability. 

The technology captures information from all relevant sources and brings it conveniently together in one place to enhance our knowledge of the big picture while ensuring we are capturing the information the corporation needs. Our use of the technology has also helped leverage new funding opportunities from other levels of government and be in a ready-to-go position to maximize new opportunities. As we continue to build our capabilities, demonstrate our fiscal responsibility through solid financial planning tools, we’re able to get more done with the same resources. Our good roads rating has increased from 30 percent of roadways to almost 50 percent and we are excited about the additional gains we’ll see in maintenance management activities moving forward.

The City of Cambridge’s assets are now inventoried and part of a compressive package to help safeguard them for the future. As analytics continues to evolve, we look forward to leveraging the technology as it provides even deeper insights into the health of the City’s $1.5 billion assets so we can come up with more proactive measures to avoid system breakdowns and mitigate the consequences when they do occur. This will be the big pay off in the future – not only from financial and sustainability standpoints, but in the quality of infrastructure for our citizens.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data analytics, Government Services, IBM Smarter Planet, smarter analytics, smarter government, urban infrastructure