One of the vital lessons IBM learned from studying its 100-year history is that in order to survive for a long time organizations have to constantly transform themselves–and they must get out ahead of the changes that are coming rather than reacting defensively to them. There is no aspect of a business where this lesson is more important than in the IT department. Chief information officers earn their keep by managing their operations efficiently and effectively–making the trains run on time. But they’re even more valuable when they help create a commercial organism that’s capable of constantly renewing itself–a smarter enterprise. Then, they’re playing the role of a transformational CIO.
Jeanette Horan
Jeanette Horan, who became IBM’s CIO in May after 13 years with the company, is just settling into her new role, but already she has a clear vision of what she wants to accomplish. “The CIO truly sees the whole company,” she says. “We touch every process inside IBM. Also, we’re a showcase for IBM’s technologies. We walk the talk.”
She’s focused on three spheres: IT transformation, which is achieving improvements in IT operations through bold strokes; business transformation, which is improving the integration of IT with the business; and work transformation, which is all about revolutionizing the way employees are provisioned with technology. She’s aligned with the Smarter Planet principles, using new technologies that make it possible to better monitor business activities, manage the company’s vast portfolio of assets and bring analytics to bear to optimize operations.
—————
This is the first in a series of essays about The Payoff from Smart. The second and third installments will be published on July 22 and July 29.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Long the province of Internet startups and Wall Street outfits, cloud computing is at last going mainstream. That conclusion smacked me upside the head when I spoke to Jessica Carroll, managing director of IT at the United States Golf Association. “I see great opportunity in the cloud. We can run applications and do our backup without a huge capital outlay. We don’t have to buy servers of our own or train staff,” she said.
The USGA is golf’s governing body in the US and Mexico and conducts 13 national champions each year–including the US Open. It’s located in rural Far Hills, New Jersey, but it’s no technology backwater. Carroll is running several primary applications in the cloud and subscribes to a data backup service from IBM for all of her mission critical computing applications.
The reason I spoke to Carroll was that IBM on June 20 announced a pair of new cloud services, including virtualized server recovery and data archiving. IBM began developing its cloud services for backup and recovery several years ago, and engagements like the one with Carroll and the USGA helped the company hone its offerings.
Backup and recovery aren’t typically on the top of companies’ IT priority lists. They’re not exciting like new applications. “But I look at it as insurance,” Carroll told me. “Why wouldn’t you want to have coverage on your most important asset, which is your data?”
By: Linda Ban, Global CIO Study Director, AIS Studies, IBM Global Business Services
There is big business in big data.
Indeed, information is exploding and we live in the era of data. This data is valuable, and can be mined to detect patterns that improve decisions and provide better outcomes for businesses, institutions and individuals.
CIO’s can take advantage of this exploding data and seize big data opportunities as computing goes beyond increased storage, better search, and more complex analytics to systems that enable humanity to reach its greatest potential for human creativity, innovation and ingenuity.
CIOs will need to act as both strategy collaborators and as technology managers and apply analytics to gain a new level of intelligence capitalizing on the opportunities provided by big data. More than ever before, CIOs must plan now to focus on enabling the organization to make faster decisions, and preparing the IT environment to accommodate rising levels of change and complexity to help organizations drive better business outcomes.
Essential Actions for the CIO are to: Continue Reading »
Posted by
Jack Mason in
UPDATE: You can now catch the replay of the webcast recorded live Wednesday, April 27, from 12:30 -1:30 EST.
Topic: Companies increasingly need to transform functions from operations to customer care via new digital techniques and technologies. But can they do this fast enough, and far enough, to keep pace with the growing power of their connected customers?
* * *
Panelists:
- Ragna Bell - (moderator) IBM Institute for Business Value, Strategy & Transformation Leader
- Robin Carey – CEO, Social Media Today
- Saul Berman – IBM Global Business Services, Global Innovation & Growth Strategy Leader
- Andrew McAfee - a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management
- Paul Papas - IBM Global Business Services, Global Leader, Smarter Commerce
About the ibm Global Business Services vPanel Series: vPanels are webcam-based interactive webcasts to foster dialogue between thought leaders and viewers. Viewers can participate via the integrate chat to share their views and questions. Subscribe to the series to sample past discussions and to be alerted to new ones.
Download the complete IBM Institute for Business Value study (1.30MB)
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Last September, when IBM was on the verge of signing a landmark agreement to provide information technology services for Bharti Airtel in Africa, our chief executive, Sam Palmisano, insisted on flying to Kenya on short notice to participate in the press conference announcing the deal. He wanted to demonstrate his personal commitment to the economic future of Africa.
IBM’s task is to not only manage Bharti Airtel’s information technology but to transform the 16 different IT environments serving the company’s African operations into a single integrated system. “At IBM, we see this kind of transformation through the lens of what we call ‘building a smarter planet,’” Palmisano said at the press conference in Nairobi. “By integrating much of the continent… this new infrastructure will enable systems of all kinds, from commerce to government services and more.”
Just a few months have passed since that historic day, but, already IBM has begun fulfilling the promise of bringing its Smarter Planet agenda to Africa. Our company is opening new subsidiaries in multiple countries, including Ghana and Senegal, while expanding its footprint in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.
IBM realizes that in Africa our approach to doing business is at least as important as the portfolio of products and services we offer. If we can provide ideas and solutions that help the governments and businesses of Africa perform better, we will improve the economic climate for citizens and for businesses alike. The market for goods and services is growing rapidly, but it remains small by global standards. “In Africa, it’s not a matter of taking a slice of the pie. You have to help make the pie first,” says Anthony Mwai, general manager of IBM East Africa.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
In the next couple of years, there are expected to be 2 billion people connected to the Internet. At the same time, the instrumentation and interconnection of the world’s human-made and natural systems is exploding–which could mean that there soon will be more things connected to the Internet than there are people who are connected. This Internet of Things promises to give people a much better understanding of how complex systems work, so they can be tinkered with to make them work better. But it also opens up a whole new sphere of insecurity. Each of those sensors is, potentially, a point of vulnerability to people who write malicious code for fun, or profit, or to further their political goals.
Andreas Wespi
Harm could come in many forms, but some of the most hurtful scenarios for attacks on the Internet of Things include electrical power and communications blackouts, disruption of air traffic and roadway traffic lights, interruption of oil and gas exploration and contamination of water. So far, these concerns are mostly theoretical, but the spread of Stuxnet, the computer worm that targets control systems at nuclear power plants, shows just how dangerous such attacks can be. The worm knocked out about 1,000 centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant last year–and atomic energy experts warn that it has the capability of creating Chernobyl-like disasters. “We have to understand the new threats and understand how to protect our own infrastructure,” says Andreas Wespi, a cybersecurity expert at IBM Research’s Zurich laboratory.
Attacks will likely come in two ways: to the sensors and to the servers that gather, store, and analyze information from the sensors. Both kinds of vulnerability must be addressed.
6:27
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
- Analytics
- Government Services
- Green 500
- new intelligence
- Retail
- Smart banking
- Smart Grids
- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
- Smarter Communications
- Smarter Energy
- Smarter Enterprise
- Smarter Food
- Smarter Healthcare
- Smarter Planet
- Smarter Public Safety
- Smarter Systems
- Smarter Traffic
- Smarter Transportation
- Smarter Utilities
- Smarter Water
- Smarter Water Management
- Smarter Work
There’s no shortage of contests for tech startups in this world, but IBM’s SmartCamp is different. The focus is on companies that aim to make the world work better, and is aligned with our Smarter Planet agenda. We launched the program last year in Dublin and conducted regional contests this spring and summer in Stockholm, Boston, Tel Aviv, London, and Silicon Valley. (This video tells the Silicon Valley story.) There are still two contests left, in Paris on Sept. 24 and Copenhagen on Oct. 7, before the finals in Dublin on Nov. 16. So there’s time for entrepreneurs to get involved. Check it out at www.ibm.com/ie/smarterplanet/smartcamp.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Intel’s purchase yesterday of security software maker McAfee, detailed in this News.com story, signals a shift in the tech industry’s view of how to better secure computers, networks, and software programs: Security has to be built in, rather than added on later. It’s the concept of “secure by design.”
At IBM, the secure-by-design concept extends to encompass our Smarter Planet agenda. These days, its not enough to secure the traditional computing infrastructure. You’ve got to protect all of the devices and networks that are now being used to monitor, manage, and analyze everything from smart electrical grids to health care systems. “All of the physical assets of the world are becoming digitized, instrumented, interconnected and intelligent,” says Kristin Lovejoy, head of IBM security strategy. “But the sad reality is that as people develop and design these new technologies they’re not thinking enough about the issue of security. These devices are so critical that if they’re unavailable or if they’re tampered with, it could have a significant negative impact on an individual or a large population.”
When security is an afterthought, it tends to be expensive and not that effective. Plus, organizations typically find out about a vulnerability after it has already been exploited by malicious software programs.
We believe that only by designing products to be secure can organizations gain the protection they need at a reasonable price. With that principle in mind, IBM has established what we call a secure engineering framework. It’s a set of specifications that we are beginning to use in all of our design processes, for hardware and software alike.
Now that the world’s critical infrastructure is being wired and networked, security is becoming more important than ever before. Business-as-usual in the tech industry isn’t good enough any more.
Big Iron never dies. Forty-six years after the first IBM mainframe models were introduced, our company is launching a new generation of the machines today in New York City. The zEnterprise series offers the kinds of performance you’d expect: The top-of-the line machine is equipped with 96 powerful processors running at a blazing-fast 5.2Ghz, together capable of executing more than 50 billion instructions per second. In an era when PC servers run tens of applications simultaneously in virtualization mode, this model can run run more than 100,000. It’s like a computing cloud in a box.
While the sheer perform
ance numbers for zEnterprise are impressive, it also represents a major step forward in our efforts to make corporate computing smarter.
A key element of the launch is IBM Unified Resource Manager, a software innovation built into the systems that integrates a mainframe with Unix and PC blade servers as if they’re a single machine, with all of the security and reliably of the mainframe. We believe that in the not-too-distant future, the modern data center will no longer be a vast array of different types of devices and chunks of software but, instead, will be best understood as a single computing system, encompassing processing, memory, storage, networking, and all of the software and services that go with it. Conceptually and operationally, it will be one large machine. Unified Resource Manager is an important step in that direction.
This isn’t just some fancy technology trick that we’re doing because we can. The world of business computing is in the midst of a profound shift, driven by a convergence of forces. Digital intelligence is being injected into the world’s physical systems through pervasive instrumentation and global interconnectivity. That’s generating an exponential increase in the volume, quality, and speed of data. At the same time, doing business is growing in complexity and the pace of business has quickened. Companies are under intense pressure to respond to the expectations of a new generation of young people raised on the Internet, the rapid emergence of new markets, and intensifying competition.
To deal with all of these developments, enterprises need to become smarter–gathering more and better information, making sense of it, and acting wisely and immediately on what they learn. Continue Reading »
Editor’s Note: The following post by Stephen L. Sams, vice president of site and facilities services for IBM, underscores the need for CIOs to more effectively manage growth in their data centers. If data centers are allowed to grow organically, CIOs can find themselves adding unnecessary resources, increasing the power demands and carbon footprints of their data centers beyond the needs of their business workloads. This post helps CIOs understand the importance of building a modular and flexible data center for more energy efficiency now and in the future.
How do you build a data center to last 20 years when information technology is changing every 2 years
In the new economic environment, uncertainty, volatility and complexity seem to be at an all time high – and they are still rising. Business processes are becoming more interconnected and global. Standout CEO’s are focused on how to manage in a more complex environment by creating value through new perspectives, deeper insights and more information. For CEO’s and their organizations, avoiding complexity is not an option — the choice comes in how they respond to it.
CIOs can play an important role in the enterprise by developing a vision of innovation enabled by IT. How well you manage your data centers to raise the return on investment of IT infrastructure, to expand the business impact of data center operations and to make innovation real determines the level of your success. Since data centers are long-term and somewhat static investments – needing to last 20 years while the technology inside changes every 2 to 3 years – it becomes an imperative that you plan strategies to be able to react to dynamic changes.
IBM’s data center family features innovation around a modular approach which helps solve three key ways to design a smarter data center.
