At IBM, the secure-by-design concept extends to encompass our Smarter Planet agenda. These days, its not enough to secure the traditional computing infrastructure. You’ve got to protect all of the devices and networks that are now being used to monitor, manage, and analyze everything from smart electrical grids to health care systems. “All of the physical assets of the world are becoming digitized, instrumented, interconnected and intelligent,” says Kristin Lovejoy, head of IBM security strategy. “But the sad reality is that as people develop and design these new technologies they’re not thinking enough about the issue of security. These devices are so critical that if they’re unavailable or if they’re tampered with, it could have a significant negative impact on an individual or a large population.”

When security is an afterthought, it tends to be expensive and not that effective. Plus, organizations typically find out about a vulnerability after it has already been exploited by malicious software programs.

We believe that only by designing products to be secure can organizations gain the protection they need at a reasonable price. With that principle in mind, IBM has established what we call a secure engineering framework. It’s a set of specifications that we are beginning to use in all of our design processes, for hardware and software alike.

Now that the world’s critical infrastructure is being wired and networked, security is becoming more important than ever before. Business-as-usual in the tech industry isn’t good enough any more.

Technorati Tags: IBM, security, Smarter Planet

The IBM Smarter Infrastructure Lab, announced today, is going to be a 1,000-square-foot facility within one of the the university’s buildings. It will be equipped with engineering workstations, 3-D displays, a telepresence set up, massive data storage capabilities, and access to powerful clusters of number-crunching computers. “Here, people can organize and visualize their work. It will be a showcase for what we do,”  says James H. Garrett, Jr., the co-director of CenSCIR and head of CMU’s civil and environmental engineering department.

Roads, bridges, locks, dams, you name it

The folks at CMU have been focusing on infrastructure research for more than a decade, but they set up CenSCIR  four years ago to provide more of a formal structure for their work. It’s an interdisciplinary approach, with participation from the schools of engineering, computer science, architecture, social sciences, and business.

Garrett is possessed by a burning sense of urgency. He’s concerned that the decline of the physical infrastructure in the United States is going to adversely affect not only safety but the country’s economic vitality. “Some nations spend a lot more of their GDP on maintenance of the infrastructure than we do,” he says. “Here, infrastructure doesn’t come to mind until things collapse. That’s no way to manage this very important piece of the economy.”

When the Lab is set up I’ll visit and create a video tour for the Smarter Planet blog.

Technorati Tags: Carnegie Mellon University, CenSCIR, IBM, James H. Garrett, Jr.

A month on and 2,000 posts later, IBM and Coventry are teaming up to make the ideas raised in CovJam real and transforming Coventry over the next 30 years.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Martin Reeves, Chief Executive of Coventry City Council explained:

“The IBM Jam brought out practical ideas. People know that we can’t change overnight, that we need to take baby steps to being a smarter city with low-cost, practical projects. I was really impressed with some straightforward, not very costly ideas that people would like us to implement over the next few years.”

With cities getting larger, facing tougher economic and environmental pressures than ever before this type of idea generation is setting  the tone and direction for using what resources are available in an efficient manner. Directing those resources towards the things that people really need to attract inward investment, improve employment prospects, personal security and quality of life.

You may think that this type of interaction with residents would restrict the participation of some groups in older age groups, far from it. 28% of those that declared their age group we over 50.

IBM will continue to analyse the data and unearth valuable insight that will inform Coventry’s Sustainable Community Strategy. As Reeves pointed out, this is just the start:

“The CovJam represents the start of a new open and honest dialogue between the City Council and its residents. We’re willing to take risks and be innovative in order to build closer, more dynamic relationships with all our stakeholders.”

The first idea – to guide tourists from the railway station to the city centre -  is already being put into action and more will feature in future planning initiatives.

Press release available

Technorati Tags: business, citizens, cityscan, Coventry, IBM, idea, jam, redevelopment

Slideshow: IBMer Michele Grieshaber shares her team's Corporate Service Corps adventure in Ho Chi Minh City.

Ten million hours is a lot of time.  1,141 years, actually.  So it is somewhat amazing to learn that that’s the total amount of time IBMers have spent volunteering through IBM’s On Demand Community initiative over the last five years.

Over a millennium of cumulative volunteer service in communities around the world; that’s a remarkable milestone in our journey to build a smarter planet.

That it is just one of the interesting pieces of information you’ll find in IBM’s latest Corporate Responsibility Report.  The report provides an annual update on IBM’s strategies, activities and results in the areas of governance, supply chain, the environment, employment practices and community partnerships.  You can access this interactive version that will let you dive into specific content and learn about how IBMers are making the planet healthier, more sustainable and smarter.

When you look at those 10 million hours of service, you can see a clear trend.  Skills-based volunteering is on the rise.  People are directly applying their professional talents, experience and education to local charitable efforts.  This is how you build a smarter planet; not just by writing a check and making a donation, but by volunteering your knowledge to make the systems in your community smarter.

One example is Linda Adams.  Linda, an IBMer in New Jersey, realized her son’s school needed a technology overhaul when a manual phone notification process failed to inform her of an emergency lockdown.  So she embarked on a mission to make her local school system smarter by applying her skills, not just by donating her time.  She started by transforming the school’s manual phone chain into an automated, computerized system.  Through her multi-year journey of volunteering at the school, Linda came to view it as a set of interdependent systems that could be made smarter.  She has since streamlined school newsletters and directories, built online calendars and curricula, developed web-based interfaces for the PTA, and more.  In effect, she is taking her professional expertise as a project manager and engineer and applying it to a local, meaningful cause.  [Listen to a conversation with Linda to learn more about her skills-based volunteerism.]

IBMers like Linda can access similar opportunities through an internal portfolio provided by On Demand Community, IBM’s volunteer and community service initiative. It helps IBMers find local volunteer activities and identify the skills and expertise they can contribute.  It also lets IBM’s employees and retirees log their volunteer hours, thereby earning IBM Community Grants for the schools and nonprofit organizations they support.  Since its inception, over 10 million hours have been logged in On Demand Community by nearly 150,000 participants.

Access the 2009 Corporate Responsibility Report for more on skills-based volunteerism and other ways IBMers are building a planet smarter.

Technorati Tags: volunteerism corporate_responsibility

While some organizations struggle with this deluge of data, others are turning it into opportunity. Today, IBM is launching a new series of client success stories, shining a light on how businesses and governments from around the world are turning mountains of data into concrete opportunities to better serve their clients, improve citizen service and innovate in ways that have never been possible. And with more than 250,000 organizations around the world using IBM analytics, this is just the beginning.

Analyze This: DC Water

Click here to view the embedded video.

How do you monitor a water system that in part dates back to the mid 1800s? How do emergency responders know that the fire hydrant next to a burning building will work?

The answer doesn’t lie in expensive infrastructure projects or overhauling of water management systems — it lies in connecting the dots with relevant data. Predictive analytics is helping DC Water analyze enormous amount of data on weather conditions, maintenance and hundreds of other variables to uncover usage patterns and spot problems, like water main breaks, before they occur.

To learn more, visit the new IBM business analytics channel on You Tube: www.youtube.com/user/ibmbusinessanalytics

Technorati Tags: Analytics, business analytics, predictive analytics, Smarter Cities, Smarter Water, water, water management

That ambition is more easily stated than accomplished, but some of the work IBM  is doing in Poland points to lessons that could help community leaders elsewhere.

Katowice, with a population of about 300,000,  is the unofficial capital of the Silesa region in southern Poland, which is known for its coal mining, steel making, and other heavy industries. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region has suffered economically. Its coal mines, in particular, became less competitive, resulting in a loss of tens of thousands of mining jobs.

Fortunately, the city and the region have some inspired and energetic leaders, among them Katowice Mayor Piotr Uszok. The goal is to shift to high-tech and service industries–supported by improvements in the transportation system. Uszok asked IBM for help in devising an economic renewal plan, and, as a first step, we sent in a five-person team from our Corporate Service Corps to help size up the situation.

The CSC, which has been called a “business” version of the Peace Corps, sends small groups of IBMers with diverse talents into countries or cities to help them craft economic development strategies, beef up government services, and improve systems such as transportation, health, and water. Some of the teams, such as the one that went to Poland, are made up entirely of executives–bringing a higher level of expertise and management skills to the projects.

Visiting Katowice this spring, the team engaged with a group of community leaders who have been jointly developing regional strategies for several years. At the same time, they’re open to new ideas, particularly along the themes of attracting foreign investors to create new jobs, improving the quality of life, and updating the transportation system.

The team members met with about 200 people from government, academia, and businesses. From these conversations they drafted a set of recommendations, which they presented to mayor Uszok in a marathon five-hour meeting. (The mayor demonstrated his commitment to strategic planning by continuing the meeting even though the city was under a severe flood threat.)

Part of the plan in Katowice itself is to tear down large sections of deteriorated, Communist-era buildings and replace them with stylish, modern structures. They’re creating a pedestrian zone to encourage shopping and cultural activities in the downtown.

But Katowice is also working with leaders in about 25 neighboring cities to create a regional program, as well. The challenge is coming up with a unifying theme that all of the cities can agree on. “They’re trying to merge their brands to have one voice,” says Karen Howe, an executive in IBM Systems & Technology Group who was one of the Corporate Service Corps team members.

For Karen, the brand challenge was best illustrated by the fact that when the team visited the various towns around Katowice, they were usually presented with small metal pins by the local leaders. “We got a lot of pins with different slogans on them,” she says.

A second CSC team is visiting Katowice this summer to help flesh out the branding, economic development, and  transportation proposal’s made by Karen’s group.

Mayor Uszok seemed pleased by his initial encounters with IBMers.  “Very often we have visits of teams from other countries in order to evaluate our town,” he said at a press conference in May. ” However, in the past, there was never such a case that a team of experts tried to experience living in the city and verify its strong and weak points, and later pull together a list of recommended activities.”

Film maker Woody Allen is credited with the quip, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” The CSC teams are dedicated to doing a lot more than that. One of their challenges will be helping communities to redefine themselves in much the same way that great companies establish their brands. In Katowice, step one of that mission has been accomplished: recognizing that it must be done.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: branding, economic development, IBM, Katowice, Poland, Smarter Cities

The results of the survey point to a growing global need: Better management of transportation systems to get people where they want to go faster. “In the mega cities in fast-developing countries, they need to address these issues with a high level of urgency or their transportation systems will break down completely. Every street could become a parking lot,” says Naveen Lamba, the industry lead for intelligent transportation in IBM’s Global Business Services division.

The detailed results of the survey show that many of the efforts to take the pressure off highways aren’t catching hold. For instance, carpooling gets only low-single-digit participation in most of the cities. New Delhi, with 11%, and Johannesburg, with 8%, are a couple of the relative bright spots.  More typical are Buenos Aires’ 4% and Houston’s 3%. In the United States, neither the establishment of HOV lanes or commuter parking lots has made much of a difference. The ranks of telecommuters are sparse all over, too. Just 4% of those in Johannesburg work at home–the highest rate. It’s zero in Madrid, Moscow, Beijing, and Mexico City.

Indications are that the situations in some burgeoning cities will only get worse. Right now only 39% of commuters in Beijing drive their own cars, compared to 92% in LA. But the situation is changing fast. The number of new cars registered in Beijing in the first four months of 2010 rose 23.8% to 248,000, according to the Beijing municipal taxation office. Clearly, when more people in Beijing own cars, the authorities will have to add even more ring roads to the ever-growing network of  highways encircling the city.

Fortunately, Beijing authorities aren’t counting on highway projects alone to address their exploding transportation needs. Beijing’s total investments in its subway system are projected to be nearly $50 billion through 2015 as the city  more than doubles its current reach, according to Beijing Infrastructure Investment Co., Ltd.

Across the globe, relief will come only when cities and metropolitan regions consolidate authority over all or most transportation modes on a single agency–or a small handful of agencies. Lamba says they need to coordinate the operations of everything from roads and bridges to ferries, trains, and subways. That way, they can put together a package of incentives and disincentives that redistribute commuters to different modes of transportation–with the primary goal of removing many one-person cars from the roads at peak travel times. Such an approach is working in Singapore and London, and is beginning to work in Dubai.

I saw one bright spot in the survey results that gave me a little bit of hope for the future: a handful of cities where large numbers of people bicycle or walk to work. For instance, 23% of Amsterdam’s commuters use bicycles as a primary mode of transportation; and 10% of the people in Buenos Aires walk. Unfortunately, in many cities, the places where people work and live have been divorced from each other, so there’s little hope of changing the situation in any meaningful way. Or, maybe that’s too bleak a conclusion. What if cities set up something like those airport people conveyors on sidewalks or streets? Weather’s a factor, sure, but maybe there’s a way it could be done.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mexico City’s congestion problems

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Planet, traffic congestion, traffic jams

Coventry City Council in the UK is running the first city based Jam, to take the conversation beyond city leader to its citizens. Why? Because none of us have all the answers. Pulling from a wider pool of people, experiences, backgrounds and expertise will give Coventry an edge in finding out what it needs to provide to its people and business.

Image via Wikipedia

Coventry CC is calling their event the CovJam, and it will be taking place on 29 and 30 June and 1 July.

It looks to be a great event for the people in and around Coventry (or even from Coventry) to shape the way they live. A real step on the way to building a smarter city in the heart of the UK.

If you would like to be one of those taking part, please e-mail:communications@coventry.gov.uk with the subject line “CovJam”

What’s a Jam?

A Jam is an online discussion (think brainstorming on an epic scale) around a group of pre-selected themes, that an organisation wants to find innovative answers to.  Within the themes there are many discussions happening at once. The event is driven by specially invited subject matter experts, stakeholders and hosts, that help highlight interesting and valuable contributions from people like you and me, taking part in the Jam.

As you may know we have had lots of Jams in IBM, its become part of the culture and especially this version which is a mini-Jam, essentially a more focused Jam with fewer themes.

This Jam will be covering the following themes:

• The rebirth of Coventry: The urban design for a future city. What do we do to the centre of Coventry to make people want to live here, work here, shop here, socialise here?
• Sent to Coventry: Be inventive. What does Coventry really want to be known for?
• Aspiring Coventry: Yes we can! Aiming high and fulfilling our potential. How can the people of Coventry believe in themselves and their city?
• Community Cohesion: Getting on together and celebrating diversity. As the city continues to grow and change, will it remain relaxed and at peace with itself with its citizens feeling a strong sense of place and able to get along with each other
• Citizens in the driving seat: The relationship between the state and the individual

Good luck to everyone taking part – Jams are usually a blast.

More details on the Coventry CC web site.

Technorati Tags: brainstorming, cityscan, Coventry, Coventry City Council, crowdsourcing, England, IBM, innovation, jam, smartercities

The concept behind these projects is simple. Gather data about city life from a wide variety of sources, crunch it, and display it in visual forms–so it has maximum impact. One of the projects, Trash Track, uses cellular GPS tags attached to a variety of different kinds of refuse to follow its path from the dumpster to its ultimate resting place. Another, Copenhagen Wheel, captures traffic and pollution data gathered from bicycles. A third, Real Time Rome, uses mobile phone use patterns to show the movement of people after sporting events in the city.

I saw the show last week along with a handful of IBMers and creative agency colleagues. Our guide was Peter Hirshberg, a former Apple executive and serial entrepreneur who is on the foundation’s board of directors. He told us that bringing together data, analysis, and visualization “puts the science back in social science. You can begin acting on this stuff.”

One of the most empowering aspects of the projects is that citizens don’t just see their world mapped out in new ways, they participate in the mapping–which increases their commitment to making change happen in their communities.

The Gray Area gallery  is located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, the city’s longtime Red Light district–a gritty area with a high poverty rate and a lot of homeless people. In fact, the gallery is housed in a former porn video parlor, and still has the funky “Arts Theatres” marquee out front.

One of the foundation’s goals is to improve the neighborhood. In connection with the senseable cities show, it teamed with a local public television station (KQED) and other community organizations to sponsor an event called CITYCENTERED, a symposium, workshops, and neighborhood walk aimed at getting people engaged in the community. One piece, for example, Urban Remix, was a participatory media project that uses mobile phones as a platform for capturing the sounds and images of city neighborhoods–useful for documenting noise pollution and other obnoxious messes.

For people like me, who love cities but wish they were a bit more livable, this stuff is exciting. If you want to learn more or get involved, the show runs until Aug. 11 at the Gray Area gallery, 55 Taylor Street. But if you can’t see the show there, it will be traveling to San Jose and Amsterdam later this year and to New York, Tokyo, and other places next year.

Technorati Tags: Gray Area Foundation, IBM, MIT, senseable cities, Senseable City, Smarter Cities

These are complex situations. Cities are systems of systems, from transportation and health care to public safety and utilities. Understanding the workings of each individual system is complex by itself. But to improve the functioning of cities you have to understand and manage the interdependencies between the systems. So it’s a step by step journey, Rometty said.

Step #1: Instrument to manage. You’ve got to collect a lot of data; then understand it, manage it, and act on it. She mentioned a great example. It’s not a city situation, actually, but it demonstrates the power of instrumentation: In New Zealand, farmers discovered that dairy cows produce more milk when when they listen to music. But all cows don’t have the same taste in music, so farmers use the RFID tags attached to each cow to identify them when they enter the milking stall and play each one the music they like best. Who knew!

Step #2: Integrate to innovate. By combining data from many related sources, city leaders can draw superior insights. A good illustration is New York City’s Realtime Crime Center. The city gathers a tremendous amount of data about crimes and criminals and makes it available to police managers and individual police officers on a realtime basis. This makes it possible for police to respond quickly and to even anticipate crimes, and to predict where a person might go after they commit a crime. The system has contributed to the city’s incredible public safety improvements: The crime rate has dropped by 27% since 2001.

Step #3: Optimize to transform. All the data in the world doesn’t matter much if you don’t do something with it–have an impact on people’s day-to-day lives. A cool example here is Singapore. The tiny country is pushing public transportation hard. Working with IBM Research, it has developed a system that makes it possible for bus riders to find out  if their bus is going to be on time. In the future, they’ll be able to know if a bus is overcrowded. Maybe they’ll wait for one with open seats. It’s all part of an effort to make public transportation both a way of life and a pleasurable experience.

Actually, there’s another step that’s got to come first, Rometty said. That’s getting all of the parties involved in the project to agree on what their common ambition is. Otherwise, they’ll be pulling against each other from beginning to end.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, cities, IBM, rfid, Smarter Planet