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By Clay Luthy, Global Distributed Energy Resource Leader, Energy & Utilities Industry, IBM
With gas prices hovering at $4.15 per gallon where I live, the talk of electric vehicles (EVs) has increased with vigor. More of my neighbors and friends are toying with the idea of making the switch – much of their reluctance though stems from the fear of inconvenience – will I find a charging station as easily as a gas pump, how will this impact my energy bill, how far can I go on a single charge? These consumer concerns are driving new innovations – uniting forward thinking players to perfect and deploy a smarter EV driving experience.
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By Jonathan Marshall, Chief, External Communications
Pacific Gas and Electric Company
Electric vehicle (EV) owners and electric utilities may soon enjoy a much closer and more fulfilling relationship than traditional car owners have with gas stations, thanks to a new pilot project announced today by IBM, Honda Motors, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). This collaboration aims to demonstrate the ability to optimize the charge schedule for each customer’s EV battery so that the needs of customers and the electric grid are satisfied on an ongoing basis. That’s still a stretch for most utilities. Continue Reading »
By Andrew Juarez
Lead Systems Specialist
Information Systems and Services
Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated
My company has a huge thirst for data. It’s one of the key resources that keeps our operations running smoothly as we produce roughly 150 million cases of soft drinks each year and distribute them to stores and restaurants throughout 11 southeastern states.
The products we sell aren’t high tech. They include sparkling beverages such as Coke and Sprite, bottled water, juices and sports drinks. But our business increasingly relies on cutting-edge technology to keep the bottling plants, warehouses and delivery trucks operating optimally in an increasingly competitive business environment. The pressures on us: We need to run lean and to get the freshest beverages to consumers when they’re thirsty.
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Chris Luongo in
Most companies have massive amounts of data at their disposal, yet fail to use it in the most meaningful ways.
But what if they could tap into this “big data” to uncover lucrative business opportunities? What if they had the “inside information” they needed to retain customers or improve research? What if they could inject certainty and predictability into the decision-making process?
Participants at this week’s Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit were asking these questions, and they were finding highly intelligent and profitable answers in clever analytics software and services that can process all the different kinds of data and make it more useful in key business decisions and processes — with impressive results.
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By Steve Canepa, General Manager, Global Media & Entertainment Industry
February seems to be a month of excitement for all movie, television and sports enthusiasts. It’s that time of year – Super Bowl madness and Oscar Buzz – frenzy so electric that it transcends worlds – into the social media world. Think about it, how long does it take for you to see a Tweet or Facebook post once you hear the winner for Best Motion Picture or following the first touch-down? Seconds? Continue Reading »
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.
