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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As a resident of Washington DC, I don’t have to look very far without noticing the well-established bike sharing program that is currently in place.  Locals are biking to and from the subway station and to work while tourists are cruising along to increase the number of monuments and museums they can see in a day.

This approach to urban commuting is now applied to electric vehicles. For example, in Paris, Autolib launched an EV sharing program with great success. According to initial reports, 250 vehicles hit the road on the first day, 2000 are expected this summer and 3,000 are planned within the next two years. Like bike sharing, I can see why this mode has taken off in a city with over two million citizens and highly dense roads – a strategy that I believe, should be replicated in cities around the world.

New business models are being deployed to support privately owned electric vehicles as well. In Israel, Better Place is set to go live on a deployment of networked charging stations. Their innovative business model helps reduce the cost as users pay for electric vehicles much like they do a cell phone – they receive a discounted price on the vehicle and battery in exchange for subscribing to a service to recharge. Innovative business models are often what is needed to bring new technology to the mainstream.

Innovation is also driving the way we create fuel for electric vehicles. Already we are seeing renewable energy becoming cost competitive with traditional energy sources due to improved manufacturing processes and technological breakthrough. Within the next 5 years, we can expect to see the levelized cost (a common cost metric) of electricity generated from roof mounted solar to be the same as, or potentially even less than, your retail electricity price. This, to me, is exciting news for both our environment as well as for our transportation system.

It’s a known fact that electric vehicles can help increase the use of renewable energy. If EVs can communicate with the grid, they can charge based on the availability of renewable energy resources, such as sun and wind. This will help overcome the variability and relative unpredictability of renewable energy (the sun doesn’t always shine when it’s supposed to!) —a challenge that needs to be addressed if renewable energy will scale.

It’s also why the recently announced project with Honda and PG&E is so important – it allows vehicles and the grid to directly communicate with each other. Layer in IBM’s cloud based optimization and automatically, the vehicles become intelligent —now with the ability to charge in accordance with grid conditions.

IBM, Honda, and PG&E Enable Smarter Charging for Electric Vehicles

However, innovative business models and electricity from renewable sources will be less impactful if we are not successful at making the experience of recharging your electric vehicle as easy as pumping gas. This means that we must ensure open access to charge posts for all users regardless of who owns or operates them. Innovation is likewise occurring on this front — Data standards are under development to ensure charge posts communicate in a common way Think of it this way, what happens when you go from one city or state to another and need to recharge your vehicle?

You may be the realm of another service provider and much like cell phones in the old days, if proper systems aren’t place, you may not be able to recharge outside of your network.

In Europe, IBM and a consortium of partners are building a demonstration system that allows for seamless interoperability. As an example, a participant could drive from Barcelona to Rome, charge their vehicle and be accurately billed for the electricity even though the network of charge posts in the two cities are owned and operated by two separate entities.

Similarly, the IBM team in Slovakia is working with ZSE on a project that is designed to make charging across territories more convenient for consumer. Using e-mobility technology, this study will help interconnect the Slovakian capital city, Bratislava and Vienna with a “green highway” of public charging stations.

IBM and ZSE Create Virtual Green Highway for Electric Vehicles

It’s innovations like these that keep me both optimistic and fascinated by the future of the electric vehicle. With fuel prices rising higher and higher, the decision to switch to EVs is getting more attention but is till by no means an easy one, especially considering that Americans on average purchase a new car every five years. So, we all want to ensure we’re making the right decision.

The industry, local and national governments, auto-manufactures and utilities are making significant in-roads – the rest is up to us.

Today marks the last day of #EVweek. Thank you for participating in all of the various online activities. If have more opinions, we’d like to hear them. Continue the conversation today on IBM’s People for A Smarter Planet (P4SP) for #SmarterFriday, a daylong chat about EVs.

Technorati Tags: Clay Luthy, EDISON, EKZ, electric vehicles, energy, EV, EVweek, Honda, IBM, PG&E, smart grid, Smart Grids, Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet, Smarter Transportation, sustainability, traffic, transportation, ZSE

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.

When the typical power engineer hears “electric vehicle,” he or she usually thinks: “challenge.” A plug-in vehicle can draw as much power as three homes in the more temperate parts of California. An enthusiastic bunch of early adopters could potentially overload local circuits if they all charge up at the same time in the same neighborhood.

But PG&E is thinking instead, “opportunity.” For one thing, we have a growing number of clean electric vehicles in our own fleet, from Chevy Volts to a new class of extended-range pickup trucks from Via Motors. And we know that widespread adoption of EVs throughout California will help the state meet its ambitious clean-air goals.

For another, we believe there’s great potential for using the latest “smart grid” technology to facilitate vehicle charging at night, when demand is low. By making use of underutilized generation and grid resources at off-peak times, EVs can help utilities make more efficient use of their assets and spread costs over a wider load without overtaxing the system.

PG&E demonstrated last year, in the first utility test of smart charging, that it could control vehicle charging through its SmartMeter™ infrastructure. But in a competitive marketplace, many customers may want to put control of their charging in other hands—such as the vehicle manufacturer or another trusted vendor. The whole process may someday be controlled by a third-party app on your smart phone.

The IBM-Honda-PG&E pilot takes an important step in that direction. The basic concept is to marry Honda’s knowledge of the status of its EVs and PG&E’s knowledge of the status of its grid with IBM’s “cloud” computing power to make charging smarter, simpler, and more efficient.

“We want to encourage third parties to innovate,” said Ulric Kwan, PG&E’s project manager. “What we haven’t yet demonstrated is whether you can develop a ‘brain’ in the cloud that meets our needs and those of our customers. Each customer has a different set of needs. The cloud has to figure this out and provide the proper charging levels to each EV, adapting to changing customer requirements and grid needs.”

This new pilot will demonstrate exactly that. IBM will take data from several Honda Fit EVs, via cellular uplink, and analyze it together with sample data from PG&E on the status of its electric distribution network to help optimize the charging schedule for each car. (Honda plans to begin selling the Fit EV to California customers this summer).

PG&E, meanwhile, still has plans—awaiting approval by the California Public Utilities Commission—to recruit up to 100 EV owners to test more advanced communications between the utility and EV battery chargers via SmartMeters™. This proposed pilot would bring us one step closer to the holy grail of using EV batteries as a form of distributed energy storage for capturing and making good use of fluctuating supplies of renewable energy.

For all of these projects, the overriding goal is the same: to ensure safe, reliable, and affordable service to our customers. Fortunately, PG&E has some very smart partners to help us make that happen.

Join PG&E and IBM for the #EVWeek Twitter Chat on April 12, from noon to 1pm ET @smarterplanet. For more information, visit: http://storify.com/smarterplanet/p4spchat-electric-vehicle-adoption

Technorati Tags: electric vehicles, energy, EVs, EVweek, IBM, PG&E, Smart Grids, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet, Smarter Transportation, traffic, transportation

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.

Even as a lifelong IT guy, I’m continually surprised and thrilled to see the impact computers and software have on our business. In our 46 warehouses, for instance, forklift drivers have view displays that show them where every palette of products should be positioned on the floor so trucks can be loaded most efficiently. Our truck drivers and field technicians receive order and delivery  information updates during the day via mobile devices. We even inventory the spare parts on the vans our soda fountain equipment technicians drive. We consider them to be mini warehouses.

All of these handoffs of information require a sophisticated data management system. We need to mine the data quickly and continuously for business insights, so we have to make sure that the sheer volume of information doesn’t slow down the computer system’s response time. When we upgraded our system four years ago and started using IBM’s database software, the technology made it possible for us to reduce our data storage footprint by about 40%. At the same time, the growth rate of stored data was chopped in half.

Today, we’re a beta tester for IBM’s newest database software. Scientists from IBM Research have come up with new algorithms that make it possible to strip a lot of duplication out of the system. We expect this technology to compress the data by another 20%–saving us money and improving the performance of the entire enterprise.

In this era of big data, IT guys like me need help turning oceans of information into manageable streams.

Technorati Tags: Andrew Juarez, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, IBM

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click on the image to enlarge:

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, new intelligence, picture stories, predictive analytics, smarter analytics, Smarter Planet, storytelling, Watson

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?

Information flows so quickly that Twitter alone is handling approximately 35MB of data a second, every second. The majority of this social media data represents public ‘streams of consciousness’, data that approximates human thought and speech, what we in the business call unstructured data.  But, as anyone who has filled in a tax form, booked a flight or applied for a loan knows: computers prefer data with structure, data fields that have entries in strictly controlled formats.

The good news is change is coming. Computers are becoming smarter about unstructured data (unstructured data isn’t just natural language … it’s photos, videos, emails, tweets, audio, sensor data, mobile device data).  For example, using advanced analytics technologies and natural language processing we can now begin to understand the patterns behind human expression. Not just ‘key words’ that have been identified and indexed, but all words, as we type them or say them.  We may have spent most of the computing age training humans to communicate with computers, using methods optimized for the machines, but today the reverse is happening. We’re now training computers to communicate with us and understand us in our own language. It is not easy. It is as the IBM Research team behind Watson declared, a Grand Challenge. But it’s a challenge that can lead to some very important and far-reaching results.

Watson represents a pinnacle achievement in Deep QA and natural language processing but there are many routes to the top and plenty of room for additional exploration and discovery. The team of researchers, students and faculty at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg Innovation Lab are taking a slightly different approach to the Grand Challenge. Rather than using the Answer Question formulation of Jeopardy!, they are applying IBM analytics software, and some very smart coding and modeling, to train computers to understand and analyze Tweets. The project is part of an ongoing collaboration between the lab and IBM to explore how technology can be used by organizations from news outlets and journalists to movie studios, broadcasters and retailers to better understand, respond, and predict public sentiment. To date, the model has been applied to film forecasting, the World Series and fashion retailing trends, in an effort to identify social media trends and better understand public opinions. For example, just last week IBM and USC analyzed millions of public tweets to determine the fans’ sentimental Super Bowl Quarterback favorite – Tom Brady or Eli Manning. Just like the game, Eli Manning in a late game-changing move, overtook Tom Brady as the Social Media MVP with 66% positive sentiment vs. Brady’s 61%.

But why stop at the World Series and Super Bowl? AIL and IBM are now collaborating with the Los Angeles Times to measure moviegoer sentiment toward the upcoming Academy Awards race.  Dubbed a ‘Senti Meter’, we’re analyzing Oscar- related positive and negative opinions shared via millions of tweets to determine who will win “The People’s Oscars”. The project has been profiled by the Los Angeles Times and we can all follow the evolving sentiment for Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Picture categories over the next two weeks by visiting http://graphics.latimes.com/senti-meter/.

This project is much more than just analyzing which best picture or movie star fans are rooting for – it’s an example of how movie studios can better understand their audience preferences and use social media to improve their marketing programs and in turn improve box office results.   There is no doubt that the Twitterverse and other social media platforms are changing communication as we know it. Tweets, Facebook and blog posts are becoming a vital resource for many organizations including the media industry to identify trends, inform reporting and understand as well as connect with their audience.

Think of how much change in the last year has been driven or expressed or reported in social media. Think how much social value could have been derived if we’d had the ability to understand and react to these social media conversations and sentiments – in context and in real time. We can now analyze the vast river of public data that streams from Twitter in its unstructured complexity, and apply a level of sentiment to the commentary. In other words the computer can now determine, with the certainty level of a non-native speaker, that the tweet it just analyzed expressed a positive or negative sentiment and how strongly that sentiment was stated – all in real-time. We can then apply this analysis to deliver business value – the effectiveness of marketing activities, customer responses to services, products and promotions, the impact of advertising, or the reaction to real world events…   the list is limitless.

This new capability will eventually deliver solutions founded on semantic analysis of Big Data that are only just now being imagined. And it will happen faster than we expect. Stay tuned, there is more on the way….

Learn more about the work IBM and USC are doing on social media sentiment http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/36720.wss

Technorati Tags: Academy Awards, Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, Education, Entertainment, entrepreneur, IBM, IBM Research, Jeopardy, Media, nfl, Oscars, picture stories, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, social media, storytelling, twitter, Watson

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.

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