By Alistair Rennie
GM, Collaboration Solutions
IBM Software Group
The iPad 2 and Kindle Fire will top many holiday wish lists this year. But not only can you play Angry Birds on these devices; tablets can be used at work, too.
Increasingly, employees are bringing in the technology they use at home and demanding the IT department accommodate them.
For years, companies have issued mobile devices to busy executives and sales representatives who depend on their company-issued devices to get the job done. However this thinking is antiquated. In today’s increasingly mobile culture, accessing critical business applications via mobile devices is a must-have for all employees.
In response, many organizations worldwide are adopting a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach. Approximately 72 percent of firms surveyed by Aberdeen Group say they allow employees to use their own smartphones or tablets for work. And a recent IDC survey said that 95 percent of workers have used technology they purchased for themselves for work. I recently met with a CEO of large and fairly conservative company in Germany who purchased 1,000 iPad devices for their employees.
The dust is settling in the cloud-o-sphere, yet this is by no means a mature industry. For one thing, the way corporations are using clouds is rapidly evolving. Based in part on the results of a survey of global business and IT leaders, some of my colleagues in IBM’s consulting ranks have come up with an analysis of the state of play that clarifies what’s going on.
They see three phases in the evolution of cloud computing for the enterprise: 1) Taking cost out of the data center via increased utilization of computing resources, 2) Using cloud services to improve business processes and operational effectiveness and 3) Innovating–using the cloud to enable new business models and to try them out quickly and inexpensively.
That third phase is just now taking hold, says David Hughes of IBM’s Global Business Services. “Business executives see that the next wave of cloud is about innovation. They see how the cloud can change the rate and pace and economics of innovation. They can try out a lot more things and push innovation forward in a variety of ways.”
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By Joi Ito
Director, MIT Media Lab
A speaker at THINK: A Forum on the Future of Leadership, in New York City today
The Internet has enabled the cost of the production and distribution of ideas and information to plummet nearly to zero–resulting in an explosion of ideas and a low cost of collaboration. This has prompted a great deal of innovation, but also a complexity, speed and capacity for amplification that makes the world a difficult and dangerous place for many organizations and human-made systems designed for a slower and simpler era.
The cost of planning, predicting and managing rapidly changing, complex systems often exceeds the cost of actually doing whatever is being planned and managed. In fact, it can be often easier to try something and iterate than to try to predict the outcome and manage the risks. Most great ideas as well as dramatic failures have been unpredictable and are only obvious in hindsight. (Don’t get me wrong: foreknowledge and planning are useful and, often, necessary; they’re just not sufficient.)
In such a world, leadership hinges on the ability to master a broad set of skills and character traits necessary for fostering a robust system, including courage, flexibility, speed, values and a strong vision and trajectory. It’s more important to have a strong compass than a detailed street map since the map is probably outdated and wrong.
Sharing is a cornerstone of what we humans do on the Web today, what puts the social in social media. We post pictures and video, offer opinions, ratings and reviews, volunteer our interests and locations. We reveal ourselves and our relationships in a billion different public acts every day.
Individually and collectively, we appear to be growing more comfortable living in public like this through our profiles, social networks and mobile communications.
Like all exponential changes, this shift in attitude and practice has crept up on us — it gradually and quietly gathered momentum over the “Web 2.0″ era of the last seven years. In the last several years, the volume and ubiquity of this sharing and conversing has gone supercritical. From Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and LinkedIn to hundreds of other online avenues, sharing has become the defining quality of digital society.
Now businesses and organizations are seeking to adapt to the Social Web and incorporate this big switch in human behavior and cultural habits into their operations and strategies. At IBM — and consultancies such as Dachis and Altimeter — this new stratagem is often referred to as “social business.” It entails more than just business use of social software and networks for external purposes such as marketing. In the fuller view, social business is about re-shaping organizations to become more collaborative, communal and capable in fostering human relationships. Not surprisingly, such a new frontier is right in the wheelhouse of the strategy & transformation consulting services offered by Global Business Services (GBS), the part of IBM I work in.
The leader of my group in GBS communications, Christine Kinser, makes an excellent point about the human dynamics at the heart of social business — that our relationships (with colleagues and customers) are forged on trust, a shared sense of purpose and a willingness to share and build on each other’s ideas. In this sense I think you could say that a social business strives to be a much more human (and humane) kind of entity.
Like many IBM colleagues, I’m one of those early adopter types that constitutionally likes to try new things and share everywhere. Inside IBM, we share prodigiously through our intranet infrastructure of blogs, wikis, forums, file-sharing, social bookmarks and communities. Externally, we engage via a seemingly endless array of vehicles and methods (IBMers are, for example, one of the largest groups represented on the new Google Plus network). I am also fortunate that my knowledge-hunting, -gathering and -sharing is a central part of my job.
On this score, my informal social contract with IBM is pretty great — I’m not just able to devote time and energy to strategic sharing and innovating in social media, I am generally recognized and rewarded for leading by these examples.
In my view, more people, in more kinds of companies and in a wider range of roles, need this kind of clear charter. Social computing skills and best practices should no longer be limited to “evangelists” or enthusiasts, but should become an integral facet of professional business leadership. Just as organizations are starting to get serious about “socializing” functions such as HR, customer support and market research, an aspiring social business needs to get serious about professionalizing capabilities such as community management, social media relations and knowledge sharing.
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Steve Hamm in
Every tech company attempts to sell potential customers on the promise that its products and services will deliver a superior return on the customer’s investment dollars. That’s not a particularly difficult task when you’re talking about traditional IT investments, which seek to improve the efficiency and productivity of the IT function itself. But it’s harder when the purpose of the investment is to boost the performance of an entire business, including placing a value on the benefits received by the customers’ customers. Such is the challenge facing IBM when it hawks its Smarter Planet solutions.
A year ago, IBM’s leaders commissioned the IBM Center for Applied Insights, an internal research group, to come up with a way of presenting the whole array of gains from Smarter Planet projects by focusing on vertical industries. The group created a new methodology for gathering and analyzing pertinent information and placing dollar values both on the components of a project and on the entire effort. The initiative, called “ROI for Smart,” has resulted in series of reports analyzing the returns for specific projects in eight industries. Steve Rogers, the director of the Center, says that unlike other approaches in the tech industry, “this is not about measuring the ROI of IBM’s products and services; it’s measuring the ROI of pursuing a Smarter Planet path and achieving higher levels of business competency.”
As a reporter covering the enterprise technology industry for two decades, I was deeply skeptical whenever tech vendors claimed that they had come up with their own assessments of the value they could create for customers. I still am. But I’m also impressed with the results that Rogers and his team have come up with.
You can decide for yourself if their analysis is credible by reading the reports:
Healthcare: Capturing Value from Patient Centered Care.
Retail: The Value of Smarter Merchandising.
Electronics: The Road to Customer Intimacy.
Banking: The Value of Credit Risk Management.
Transportation: The Value of Customer Centric Sales & Services.
Government: The Value of Smarter Social Services.
Telecom: Smarter Communications Through Analytics.
Chemicals and Petroleum: The Value of Smarter Oil and Gas Fields.
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This is the third in a series of three essays about the potential payoff from applying Smarter Planet thinking to businesses. The first two essays can be found here and here.
One of the vital lessons IBM learned from studying its 100-year history is that in order to survive for a long time organizations have to constantly transform themselves–and they must get out ahead of the changes that are coming rather than reacting defensively to them. There is no aspect of a business where this lesson is more important than in the IT department. Chief information officers earn their keep by managing their operations efficiently and effectively–making the trains run on time. But they’re even more valuable when they help create a commercial organism that’s capable of constantly renewing itself–a smarter enterprise. Then, they’re playing the role of a transformational CIO.
Jeanette Horan
Jeanette Horan, who became IBM’s CIO in May after 13 years with the company, is just settling into her new role, but already she has a clear vision of what she wants to accomplish. “The CIO truly sees the whole company,” she says. “We touch every process inside IBM. Also, we’re a showcase for IBM’s technologies. We walk the talk.”
She’s focused on three spheres: IT transformation, which is achieving improvements in IT operations through bold strokes; business transformation, which is improving the integration of IT with the business; and work transformation, which is all about revolutionizing the way employees are provisioned with technology. She’s aligned with the Smarter Planet principles, using new technologies that make it possible to better monitor business activities, manage the company’s vast portfolio of assets and bring analytics to bear to optimize operations.
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This is the first in a series of essays about The Payoff from Smart. The second and third installments will be published on July 22 and July 29.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Long the province of Internet startups and Wall Street outfits, cloud computing is at last going mainstream. That conclusion smacked me upside the head when I spoke to Jessica Carroll, managing director of IT at the United States Golf Association. “I see great opportunity in the cloud. We can run applications and do our backup without a huge capital outlay. We don’t have to buy servers of our own or train staff,” she said.
The USGA is golf’s governing body in the US and Mexico and conducts 13 national champions each year–including the US Open. It’s located in rural Far Hills, New Jersey, but it’s no technology backwater. Carroll is running several primary applications in the cloud and subscribes to a data backup service from IBM for all of her mission critical computing applications.
The reason I spoke to Carroll was that IBM on June 20 announced a pair of new cloud services, including virtualized server recovery and data archiving. IBM began developing its cloud services for backup and recovery several years ago, and engagements like the one with Carroll and the USGA helped the company hone its offerings.
Backup and recovery aren’t typically on the top of companies’ IT priority lists. They’re not exciting like new applications. “But I look at it as insurance,” Carroll told me. “Why wouldn’t you want to have coverage on your most important asset, which is your data?”
By: Linda Ban, Global CIO Study Director, AIS Studies, IBM Global Business Services
There is big business in big data.
Indeed, information is exploding and we live in the era of data. This data is valuable, and can be mined to detect patterns that improve decisions and provide better outcomes for businesses, institutions and individuals.
CIO’s can take advantage of this exploding data and seize big data opportunities as computing goes beyond increased storage, better search, and more complex analytics to systems that enable humanity to reach its greatest potential for human creativity, innovation and ingenuity.
CIOs will need to act as both strategy collaborators and as technology managers and apply analytics to gain a new level of intelligence capitalizing on the opportunities provided by big data. More than ever before, CIOs must plan now to focus on enabling the organization to make faster decisions, and preparing the IT environment to accommodate rising levels of change and complexity to help organizations drive better business outcomes.
Essential Actions for the CIO are to: Continue Reading »
Posted by
Jack Mason in
UPDATE: You can now catch the replay of the webcast recorded live Wednesday, April 27, from 12:30 -1:30 EST.
Topic: Companies increasingly need to transform functions from operations to customer care via new digital techniques and technologies. But can they do this fast enough, and far enough, to keep pace with the growing power of their connected customers?
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Panelists:
- Ragna Bell - (moderator) IBM Institute for Business Value, Strategy & Transformation Leader
- Robin Carey – CEO, Social Media Today
- Saul Berman – IBM Global Business Services, Global Innovation & Growth Strategy Leader
- Andrew McAfee - a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management
- Paul Papas - IBM Global Business Services, Global Leader, Smarter Commerce
About the ibm Global Business Services vPanel Series: vPanels are webcam-based interactive webcasts to foster dialogue between thought leaders and viewers. Viewers can participate via the integrate chat to share their views and questions. Subscribe to the series to sample past discussions and to be alerted to new ones.
Download the complete IBM Institute for Business Value study (1.30MB)
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Last September, when IBM was on the verge of signing a landmark agreement to provide information technology services for Bharti Airtel in Africa, our chief executive, Sam Palmisano, insisted on flying to Kenya on short notice to participate in the press conference announcing the deal. He wanted to demonstrate his personal commitment to the economic future of Africa.
IBM’s task is to not only manage Bharti Airtel’s information technology but to transform the 16 different IT environments serving the company’s African operations into a single integrated system. “At IBM, we see this kind of transformation through the lens of what we call ‘building a smarter planet,’” Palmisano said at the press conference in Nairobi. “By integrating much of the continent… this new infrastructure will enable systems of all kinds, from commerce to government services and more.”
Just a few months have passed since that historic day, but, already IBM has begun fulfilling the promise of bringing its Smarter Planet agenda to Africa. Our company is opening new subsidiaries in multiple countries, including Ghana and Senegal, while expanding its footprint in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.
IBM realizes that in Africa our approach to doing business is at least as important as the portfolio of products and services we offer. If we can provide ideas and solutions that help the governments and businesses of Africa perform better, we will improve the economic climate for citizens and for businesses alike. The market for goods and services is growing rapidly, but it remains small by global standards. “In Africa, it’s not a matter of taking a slice of the pie. You have to help make the pie first,” says Anthony Mwai, general manager of IBM East Africa.
