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.

However, this increasingly popular practice comes with a host of potential security issues.Moreover, managing the growing alphabet soup of interconnected devices can be a headache for IT departments. IT must now manage the new social, virtual, and mobile employee – not to mention all the applications they access.

In November, IBM announced a major advance to help organizations better secure smartphones and tablet devices in the workplace: IBM’s Hosted Mobile Device Security Management service includes a security application for smartphones and tablets, along with managed services including policy management and user compliance monitoring. IBM is providing security controls and ongoing monitoring for individual devices as a managed service, allowing IT departments to support a broad range of personal devices and capitalize on the cost savings that BYOD can offer.

For example, Cummins Inc., the largest independent maker of diesel engines, is empowering its 40,000 employees in 190 countries with a BYOD program. The ability to collaborate from a smart, mobile device enables employees from this Fortune 500 company to be more productive in more places because they can access mail, calendar, contacts, and to do lists anywhere in the world. In the future, the promise of mobile computing will help Cummins employees perform diagnostic tests while working on top of large engines to taking parts inventory and finalizing parts distribution logistics to having instant access to comprehensive business analytics that reflect a business unit’s growth in a key market segment.

Cummins’ executives say that its workers have benefited from the use of IBM Traveler collaboration software and its functions have been well integrated into its model of how they work and help to increase the productivity of their workforce.

IBM is embracing the BYOD model internally, too. IBM encourages employees to use their own devices, including iPad, iPhone’s and Android smartphones and even Android tablets, and we are moving towards providing access to critical IBM business apps on both personal and corporate-issued mobile devices.

It’s clear: the time is right for organizations to implement a BYOD program in the work place. So, when opening that iPad 2 or Kindle Fire this year, don’t forget the power it holds for work as well as play.

If you’re going that route, here’s information about seven new mobile social networking and collaboration apps recent made available by IBM that are designed for enterprise computing. The new software is available for download from the most popular app stores.

Technorati Tags: BYOD, IBM

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.”

The survey, conducted jointly by the Economist Intelligence Unit and IBM’s Institute for Business Value, tapped 572 business and IT leaders for their views on cloud use in their companies. Cloud uptake continues at a rapid pace. More than 70% of the respondents said their organizations are piloting, adopting or achieving substantial benefits from cloud computing. Asked what they expect three years hence, that number tops 90%. Even more interesting are the results pointing to innovation as a major goal. Only about 15% said they’re using clouds to create new business opportunities or transform the way they do business today. That number pushes towards 50% in the three-year time horizon.

Here are a few examples of how cloud computing allows companies and governments to radically change the way they do things:

–Netflix used to be primarily in the DVD shipping business, mailing out millions of movies on disks from regional distribution centers. But now video streaming is the core of the business. Netflix has been able to manage this transformation because the cloud model allows it to rapidly scale up streaming capacity to meet peak demand.

–Ford’s SYNC in-vehicle infotainment service can be constantly updated with new features thanks to the cloud.

IBM has been at the forefront of cloud computing for enterprises. Its early cloud services focused on helping companies manage their computing tasks more conveniently and cheaply in the cloud. But, increasingly, the new services include features that help clients create new markets and try out new business models.

Hughes points out that these are early days for cloud innovation by corporations and governments. Many new uses will be discovered as business leaders become more adventurous. In fact, keep a lookout on the A Smarter Planet blog for some upcoming posts that will explore cloud models that have the potential to have massive impacts on whole industries and on cities.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, IBM

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.

These kinds of decentralized models of leadership have been evolving and emerging in a variety of situations ranging from battle (virtual and real) to religions. The Internet has just super-charged the importance of this type of leadership in almost every organization.

Managers in large corporations no longer have the promise of promotions and long-term employment to keep employees obedient and hard working. Central corporate R&D and planning organizations can no longer provide detailed maps of the world to their staff and partners. Innovation is happening in the most unlikely parts of the organization–often outside of the organization.

Leadership today is about empowering those around you to share your vision, embrace serendipity, have the courage to take risks and learn from failure rather than be crushed by it. Diversity must be embraced and organizational borders made porous. Assets such as intellectual property and lines of software code must not prevent aggressive agility. Organizations must be willing and able to pivot away from attachment to such assets lest these assets become liabilities holding back innovation and progress.

In this new world, leaders must be courageous, visionary and comfortable in an environment where control and complete knowledge are impossible and their pursuit futile and counterproductive.

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Visit Joi Ito’s blog.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab, THINK Forum

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.

It starts with determining the kind of social contract that each worker should have with the business — not just to be a good corporate citizen — but to be an effective social businessperson. By social contract, I don’t mean a formal agreement or legal document, but a more explicit understanding between organizations and their people (or at least across teams, departments and peers)… something more defined as official policy, doctrine or value.

(IBM developed one of the most emulated corporate Social Computing Guidelines, but it is centered on giving IBMers direction on how to delve responsibly in external social media and networking. It doesn’t really establish sharing and collaboration as part of every IBMer’s role or responsibility.) IBMers and workers elsewhere should know how they are expected to share their knowledge and expertise; in return, workers should be clear on how businesses and organizations will measure and reward that behavior.

If organizations want to become more innovative and productive by encouraging and rewarding their workforce to share, collaborate and build collective intelligence they must do more than grant permission for people to build relationships and share their experience inside and outside the organization. They must bake incentives for this new way of working into their policies, management systems and training programs. As I’ve discussed elsewhere (“Social Business 101″), becoming a social business is much more about changing culture than it is about technology or tools. And changing human behavior or organizational habits is among the tallest of orders.

Right now, many businesses don’t have the kind of social (business) contract with workers they need, and may even be discouraging sharing. Some companies forbid or restrict external social sharing, largely because they don’t have the systems, controls or guidelines to make these efforts constructive rather than the productivity drain they may perceive them to be. And most aren’t set up to measure and reward how well individual workers or teams share internally, cooperate or contribute to organizational intelligence and expertise development. As my colleague Ethan McCarty notes, some of the most valuable kinds of sharing — generosity of mind, thought leadership and the like — may be particularly hard to measure.  What’s more, some workers believe that if social sharing isn’t specifically part of their performance metrics, they don’t have time for it.

As a canary in the social business coalmine, let me offer one personal example. Like many others I like to share — with colleagues, external influencers and online communities — toward the goal of making IBM a smarter organization and enhancing the company’s reputation and relationship with those I touch through the social sphere. I also benefit enormously from all that colleagues and people in my networks share with me. But I also want my peers and I to be recognized and rewarded for all of that ostensible selflessness. In truth, I’m not interested in being a prolific enabler of conversation and social interaction out of altruism, but because this approach is proving to deliver business value and utility.

Fortunately, new business analytics capabilities and online metrics promise to make sharing a commodity that can be monitored and quantified. I can imagine a kind of personal, social ROI emerging, something akin to the Klout rating that gauges people’s influence on Twitter, and now, LinkedIn, Facebook and Foursquare as well. In fact, IBM has an internal platform called Small Blue, which for those like me who opt in to participate, analyzes activity via Lotus Notes (email, instant message chats, meetings, etc) to better understand what I work on, who with, and what kind of expertise and influence I may possess. I’m willing to share all this daily dish on myself because I want our global organization to be able to know, and see, how deeply I am immersed in my focus areas, and how much I actually get done.

Some people might cringe, or be fearful, of this kind of personal openness or institutional data mining. I embrace it because I expect that the data I share (and over which which I have lots of privacy controls) will enhance my reputation and IBM’s ability to evaluate my contributions.  As a knowledge worker in a very large, complex, global organization, I want my work and effort as a social business activist to be empirical and transparent, not just anecdotal, or based solely on the subjective opinions of managers or peers, (as much as I may enjoy working and collaborating with so many of them).

In my implicit social business contract with IBM, I’m willing to share a lot with the organization (and to its great benefit, I hope) if I benefit proportionally as a result. This same kind of give-and-take covenant underlies many of the “free” Web services and applications we use across the Social Web — we get music, maps and more in exchange for sharing our digital patterns and preferences. I’m willing to make that kind of grand bargain, if the social contract is a clear, win/win proposition.

So, what kind of social contract do you want with the organization you work within? What kind do you want with your peers? What do you see as the key obstacles or impediments to an organization becoming a social business?  How do companies need to approach changing the way people work collaboratively, share knowledge and open up, inside and outside?

Jack Mason, IBM Global Business Services

(N.B. the image to the left is my Socialprint, a QR code that links to my mobile profile on Skanz … social media experimenting punches no time clock! Scan it with your smartphone and send me a message or comment)

Technorati Tags: sharing, social business, social contract

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.

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The work on the “ROI for Smart” reports was done by a small team of quants aided by experts in each of the eight industries. They identified important activities in the industries that could gain from gathering data from many sources and analyzing it with the goal of making innovative, large-scale improvements. The teams looked deeply at the results achieved by companies that have already improved their business competencies. They tapped industry and academic literature for additional proof points. Then they modeled the business competencies and associated value-creation drivers so potential customers can use them to estimate the benefits they might receive from going the same route.

Each industry study describes a progression of improvements that can be taken step by step. In the airline industry, for example, the goal is to create customer-centric sales and services. The progression starts with consistently capturing the traveler’s travel history and profile data and offering information and services to them through a wide variety of communications channels. It concludes with the airline having the ability to deliver a stream of information to customers that enables door-to-door journeys via a variety of travel modes that are interconnected and seamlessly convenient–something IBM calls an integrated travel ecosystem.

Analyzing the real results achieved by a $12 billion airline, the study concludes that a similar airline could pocket $277 million in total economic benefits. Broken down into components, 35% of the gain comes from finding new ways of creating value for customers; 28%  from expanding the airline’s role in the travel ecosystem; 24% from increasing the loyalty of targeted customers by delivering a better traveling experience; and 13% by improving productivity. “This offers the industry the ability to increase their profit margins, get away from nuisance fees and make customers happier at the same time,” says Rogers.

A lot of organizations grok the Smarter Planet vision, but these reports tell them what the technology really means for their company in dollars and cents. It provides them with the data they need to build a strong case for these types of initiatives. At least that’s the goal. Now we’ll see if this kind of deeply researched marketing activity can stimulate demand in the marketplace.

Technorati Tags: IBM

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.

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Horan’s ambitious to-do list positions her in the vanguard of her profession. IBM’s 2011 global CIO study, The Essential CIO, revealed that 83% of the 3,000 CIOs who were interviewed say they have visionary plans that include such initiatives as applying analytics to their businesses, shifting to cloud computing and enabling their employees to work more flexibly via mobile computing and communications.

In her years at IBM, Horan has played a vital role in the company’s on-going operational transformation, which has been underway for nearly a decade. For the past three years, she was in charge of the company’s Blue Harmony project–a massive upgrade and overhaul of IBM’s SAP business applications worldwide.

In 2002, IBM launched a business-transformation initiative aimed at becoming what it later described as being the premier globally integrated enterprise. Since then, work has been going on across IBM to transform core business processes, create an IT infrastructure to support and integrate processes globally and help create a culture that fosters innovation. As a result, the IT function has undergone a radical rethink. It switched from being a federated system with 128 functional and business-unit CIOs to being a single organization operating under one global corporate CIO. Today,  IBM’s core support functions are operated as shared services, which effectively eliminates unnecessary duplication in areas such as HR, finance and IT. Along with other efficiency measures taken since 2003, this shift has helped the company save more than US$2 billion in annual costs.

Here’s how Horan sees the three transformational themes she’s concentrating on now:

IT transformation: Turning IT into a shared service makes it possible to operate much more efficiently, via approaches such as data center consolidation, and makes it easier for IBM to broadly adopt  cloud computing.  One of the company’s first major cloud moves was to set up a development and test cloud, and, now, nearly all of product developer requests for server computers are handled that way. This has reduced server setup time from an average of five days to one hour and cut the number of physical servers that are needed. Other IBM clouds support HR, collaboration and data storage, and Horan is setting up a self-managed catalog of applications that will be available to IBM employees from the cloud.

Business transformation: The main goals here are to help the company expand rapidly in emerging markets and to enable the product and services business units to go to market in an integrated way.  Blue Harmony, which is gradually being rolled out around the world, enables the company to pull together in a single system all the elements of proposals for clients  (hardware, software and services) and track their progress all the way to fulfillment, invoicing and payment. IBM’s Blue Insight analytics cloud allows nearly 200,000 IBM employees to access business intelligence from more than 100 data warehouses. Analysis that used to take weeks or months can now be done in hours or minutes.

Work Transformation: For most of the history of the IT function in companies, employees have been forced to adapt to the technologies provided for them by the IT department. But that’s changing now. IBM increasingly is providing employees with the communications, collaboration and computing resources they want in the ways they want to consume them. Last fall, for instance, IBM launched Whirlwind, an internal mobile application store that’s populated with more than 500 applications. More than 28,000 IBMers who have company-provided BlackBerrys have registered for the service.

In her first month as CIO, Horan organized a handful of teams to look at such topics as security, workplace applications, mobility, etc. Her aha! moment came when she realized that she and her colleagues must connect all of these elements together into a coherent way so employees get the applications they need, securely, wherever they may be. “We have to remove the aggravations and make them delighted with IT,” she says. “That’s our challenge.”

That’s a huge hurdle. But addressing challenges that daunting is what it takes to be a transformational CIO.

Technorati Tags: CIO, IBM, Jeanette Horan

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?”

Technology companies have long offered backup and recovery services to their clients. By their nature, these services are offsite and hosted. So what’s different about backup and recover services offered from the cloud? They usually employ a multi-tenant setup, which means the data from different companies may reside on the same physical server–though they’re walled off in separate operating system virtual machines. That brings efficiencies and cost savings. The cloud services are also more flexible. Clients can order and monitor their services using a Web portal and, typically, their monthly bills fluctuate based on their actual usage patterns.

Clients who subscribe to IBM’s cloud backup services, for instance, report reductions in total costs of up to 40% and improvements in service levels of up to 30%–all without increasing staffing or capital expense.

In the USGA’s case, the shift to cloud services made it possible for the organization to conveniently back up its data at the end of each day, which is a vast improvement on its previous system of backing up data onto tape once a week. “It was an easy decision for us to go to the cloud,” Carroll said.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, IBM, United States Golf Association, US Open

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:

·    Collaborate beyond what is currently imagined

·    Live simplification as a daily goal

·    Embrace the power of analytics

·    Help grow profitability and seek new revenue

·    Provide unparalleled IT expertise

To be effective, CIOs must reach explicit agreement with C-suite colleagues and other executives on the organization’s goals and how IT can best support and facilitate them. And these agreements must be widely and clearly disseminated so that all parts of the business understand and accept IT’s primary focus.

The 2011 Global CIO Study is being released in IBM’s Centennial year as IBM celebrates the lead role it played in both establishing the need for CIOs in the 1950s and 1960s — the early days of business computing — and over elevating the position in the ensuing decades to give a voice to IT in the C-suite.

CIOs have a unique end-to-end view of their businesses, and are driving forces behind much of what it takes for companies to work smarter. With ongoing technological shifts and increasing complex environments, CIOs can deliver real business value by capitalizing on data stores.

Infrastructures based on flexible enterprise architectures can be developed to optimize new business opportunities and enable, rather than inhibit, rapidly changing business strategies. Because these infrastructures provide the greatest value when they are tightly integrated with business objectives, CIOs need to understand and influence how the enterprise will leverage technology to achieve its goals.

To download a copy of the 2011 Global CIO Study visit www.ibm.com/ciostudy

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, CIO, IT

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?

* * *

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)

Technorati Tags: andrew mcafee, business models, digital transformation, ibv, MIT, mobile, paul papas, ragna bell, Robin Carey, Saul Berman, smarter commerce, social business, social media today, study, vivu, vpanel, webcast

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.

IBM’s Smarter Planet agenda forms the foundation of our approach to doing business all around the globe. The world is increasingly instrumented, interconnected and intelligent, thanks to advances in sensors, networking, telecommunications and analytical software. These new capabilities enable organizations to manage the complex systems of the world so they run more efficiently and effectively. From water management, agricultural supply chains and environmental protection to public safety, education, energy, banking and health care, there are abundant opportunities to use technology to make the world work better.

In Africa, because of the relative immaturity of the physical, governmental and economic infrastructures, Smarter Planet solutions have the potential to produce even greater impacts than they have in more developed countries. Indeed, Africa can skip steps along the traditional development path—leapfrogging some of the world’s more advanced economies. Those more mature societies are mired in out-of-date systems for electricity, water, transportation and the like. African countries have the opportunity to include instrumentation and information-gathering capabilities from the start as they build out new systems and services.

Mobile communications is a prime example: Already, Kenya leads the world with the mobile money applications from M-Pesa and other telecommunications services. (The technology underlying the M-Pesa service is run by IBM, by the way.) Now, think of each mobile phone as a node on a vast information network. This powerful new source of connectivity makes it possible for citizens to access a wide array of commercial and government services. At the same time, it enables governments and businesses to serve their clients in ways that would have been impossible to imagine just a few years ago.

IBM is just beginning to think through the details of how its Smarter Planet solutions apply to Africa. Already, one thing is clear: It will not do to simply take solutions that have worked well in developed nations and try to force-fit them to situations in Africa. Instead, IBM stands ready to collaborate with African governments, universities and businesses to adapt and, indeed, co-create, solutions that will be effective here. Collaboration begins with listening and discussing. Our goal is to engage with leaders in Africa and to begin establishing deep relationships, which, we hope, will yield meaningful results for all stakeholders over the long haul. “Smarter Planet means we can solve problems by bringing in modern technology. We can look at an issue and bring in our technology, processes and analytics to create a solution that is better, more reliable and cheaper,” says Taiwo Otiti, general manager, IBM West Africa.

Our efforts at capacity building in Africa have already begun. We can point to important projects in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa that demonstrate our Smarter Planet capabilities and point to great developments to come. Here are a few examples:

SMS for Life, Tanzania: Using cell phones, Web sites and SMS technology, health workers in remote parts of Tanzania track inventories so they won’t run out of five life-saving anti-malarial drugs. The data is gathered and monitored in a central repository and supplies are sent out immediately in response to looming shortages. The system was developed by IBM, Novartis and Vodafone.

Land Registration, Egypt: In one of Egypt’s most prominent e-government initiatives to date, IBM helped the government establish a new digital land registration system. Earlier, government officials and citizens relied on paper records and it took many visits and an average of 193 days to complete a typical registration. Today, the work can be done online and the entire process takes less than 30 days.

Health and Welfare systems, Nigeria: IBM has helped the government of Cross River State develop processes and technology for managing two social welfare programs—free health care for women and babies, and subsistence support for poor families. The technology includes such advances as electronic medical records, smart identify cards and biometric identification.

IBM’s Corporate Service Corps, Kenya: A team of 12 IBM volunteers recently completed a month-long visit to Kenya. They helped government agencies with new ideas for improving the high-end technology talent pool, for beefing up e-government services and for diversifying and revitalizing Posta Kenya.

In the past, the Corporate Service Corps, which was modeled on the U.S. Peace Corps, was seen primarily as a way to develop teamwork and cultural sensitivity among up-and-coming IBMers. But, increasingly, the teams are taking on vital strategic projects that align with the national agendas in the countries where they serve.  The Kenya team was one of those. “IBM is helping us with our strategic direction in the investments in ICT in this country,” said Dr. Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary, Kenya ministry of information and communications.

These are collaborative engagements. The heads of government agencies define the projects that they want the teams to work on. Then the teams perform deep market research and produce detailed analyses of problems and potential solutions. Their proposals include a wide array of options, starting with actions that government leaders can take immediately and including strategic initiatives that might take years to accomplish.

The IBM team’s work on e-government in Kenya is a good example of how these strategic engagements take shape. Dr. Katherine Getao, ICT secretary, Directorate of e-Government, aims to dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government services by better gathering and sharing information internally and by making services available to citizens via computers and mobile phones. She asked the IBM CSC team to help her come up with a legal framework for organizing government data management systems and enabling citizen access.

The team surveyed legal frameworks worldwide and proposed a set of principles and actions that could place Kenya at the leading edge of e-government policy and practice. “The CSC team has been helping us tease out the issues and develop a legal framework for citizen services,” said Dr. Getao. “This is a very important area for us because we believe with the right kind of legal framework we can really quickly start to roll out services to our citizens, we can begin to share data and share systems a lot more than has been happening in the past.”

One by one, underdeveloped regions of the world have emerged to share more fully in the economic bounty made possible by the advance of technology and the globalization of business; first China, then India, then Brazil, then Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. Now, many believe it is at last Africa’s time. IBM shares that belief. Sam Palmisano proved it when he rushed to Kenya to announce the Bharti Airtel deal last year.

IBM understands that these improvements won’t come overnight. Real progress takes courage and determination and a long-term view. Also, progress won’t come unless the interests of citizens are taken into account, and people are empowered. A dynamic economy requires the participation of all stakeholders. IBM stands ready to work with African government, business and non-profit leaders—and the people of Africa–to help fulfill their soaring aspirations.

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