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.

Technorati Tags: IBM, security, Smarter Planet

The company’s heavy reliance on data began five years ago after it was purchased by a private equity firm that brought in new management and insisted on improved performance. “These days, we ask questions, understand the numbers, and, most importantly, do something,” says Gordon Robertson, vice-president of sales and marketing.

From its 12,000 acres of land in California, Sun World International sells table grapes, stone fruit, peppers, and water melons worldwide. It also breeds its own varieties of plants and licenses its genetic intellectual property to other growers. Its brands including Superior Seedless grapes, Black Diamond plums, and Honeycot apricots. It employs about 7,000 people in the fields.

Here are some highlights of how it uses business intelligence:

–The sales team analyzes the profitability of each customer and concentrates on developing the most profitable segments. As a result, sales to those segments grew 20% last year, yielding an additional $3 million in revenues.

–The company evaluates the effect of different irrigation systems on crop yields. Its increased use of drip irrigation systems has decreased  water usage by 8.5% since 2006.

–It uses data analysis to adjust the size of the vehicles and other equipment for harvesting and other farming tasks, which has reduced its consumption of fuel by 20% over the past five years.

–Its analysis of crop growing and harvesting equipment and techniques has reduced labor requirements by 10% to 15%. In one example, it changed the design of grape trellises so farm laborers could harvest grapes without having to bend over–which relieved their pain and increased productivity.

The software also allows Sun World International’s executives to move quickly when trouble strikes, as it did seven weeks ago when Australia restricted the import of California table grapes because of concerns about the spread of a breed of fruit flies. Using business intelligence software,  the company’s sales executives quickly sized up potential customers in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Taiwan, and elsewhere in Asia to take up the slack. “We could react quickly,” says Robertson.

By being smart and fast, Sun World International proves that you don’t have to be a giant to compete successfully against them.

Technorati Tags: Applied Analytix, IBM, Sun World

Using Tagwhat — the augmented reality (AR) content creation service just launched — we’ve scattered bits of content about Smarter Cities, analytics and the Internet of Things throughout the park.  On one corner there is an item about Cabsense, a new app that predicts the best nearby corner to find a taxi, based on crunching a year’s worth of GPS data and traffic patterns from NYC cabs.

Right smack in the middle of the park you can find a post pointing to the wonderful Internet of Things video with IBMers Mike Wing, Andy Standford-Clark and John Tolva.

Towards the southeast corner, near the popular Shake Shack eatery, is another tag hovering in virtual/physical space. It touches on how RFID tags are being used to track sensitive shipments such as strawberries, like those used in the Shack’s delectable hand-spun shakes.

The aim was to create, literally out of thin air, a kind of location-specific walking tour or exhibit of how cities and urban centers can become suffused with new kinds of intelligence. AR is one of the promising new dimensions of that kind of ambient intelligence converging at the cross roads of digital and physical realms. In fact, we’re calling this little pilot MadSqAIR, as in Augmented Intelligent Reality, to undescore the connection. You can follow developments  at http://www.tagwhat.com/smartercities and via Twitter at @madsqAIR.

We’re also using the Foursquare location-based social media network to let people in the Madison Square Park neighborhood discover this open AIR experience.

To see this array of posts in the park,  download the Tagwhat app from the Android market (an iPhone version is pending). You can post comments on tags, or even create some of your own.  In fact, you don’t even need a phone to create AR content. Just use the Google Maps tool on Tagwhat’s site. We hope this experiment can grow across New York City, as well as in other metropolitan centers. We also hope to put this new platform and approach to work for the upcoming 2010 Global CEO Study launch.

What uses of Augmented Intelligent Reality can you imagine that would help make our cities, systems and entire planet smarter? Please share your thoughts and comments.

• Tagwhat in Bruce Sterling’s Wired AR blog, Beyond the Beyond

Technorati Tags: android, AR, madison square park, smartphone, tagwhat

One of the most emotion-fraught scenes in Precious, the highly-regarded 2009 film, takes place when the protagonist, an overweight, illiterate, 16-year-old black girl living in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, steals a bucket of fried chicken from a fast-food restaurant and stuffs her face as she rushes to school. Rather than providing sustenance, the food makes her sick.

This scene encapsulates the extreme complexity of improving public health. A nation’s health care system is just one of many influences that determine whether individuals are healthy or not. You’ve also got to consider the family situation, education, genetics, poverty, location, transportation, retailing, advertising and a host of other factors. Each of these factors is a complex system in itself, with its own dynamics. Add them all together, with all of their interdependencies, and it looks like chaos.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Some of our research colleagues at the Almaden lab are working on a project aimed at making it possible for government and business policymakers to get an accurate, holistic view of health so they can analyze the situation well  and craft better ways of improving it. Called SPLASH (it’s an acronym, but don’t ask what the letters stand for),  the project seeks to create a technology platform and a community for integrating all of the data models that researchers and social scientists have created for the various systems affecting health. “People started to realize that this could be done, but nobody was mapping the system of systems. It’s so complicated,” says Paul Maglio, an IBM researcher who co-leads the project along with researcher Pat Selinger, who adds: “We hope to build a community of people who can contribute models and data, start a dialogue, and do joint work together.”

That dialogue was launched last week at Almaden Institute 2010, a two-day conference held at the lab in San Jose, Calif. About 200 people from different health-oriented realms watched presentations and discussed the possibilities for collaboration. Some were quite enthusiastic about forming a community. “I’d love to partner with you. I hope this can be the beginning of a good conversation,” said Kevin Grumbach, the chief of family and community medicine at San Francisco General Hospital.

There’s a lot of technical work to be done, which is one reason why IBM Research has made SPLASH one of its so-called grand challenges–big-bet projects that require technical breakthroughs. The difficult tasks include defining software languages and methods for describing and matching data models,  and inventing frameworks for integrating the various models.

The other main challenges are not technical: Understanding how to communicate effectively with policymakers and defining innovative business models that  create win-win situations for various participants in the system. What kinds of incentives, for instance, could government leaders create to induce grocery stores stocking a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables to locate outlets in inner city neighborhoods?

For starters, the team will attempt to create an integrated model for addressing the causes and effects of obesity.

This effort is certainly daunting, but, if it works, it could help transform the art of  health policy decision making into a science.

Some of our IBM colleagues at the Almaden research lab in San Jose are taking a step towards answering that question at a two-day conference starting today. The goal of the conference, Almaden Institute 2010, is to help achieve better health through modeling and simulation. They’ve invited experts from academia, government health agencies, health care providers, and policy think tanks. Among the speakers are John D. Sterman, professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, and Margaret Brandeau, professor at Stanford. Sterman’s speech, A Banquet of Consequences: Management Flight Simulators for Climate Change Policy, will be streamed starting at 9 a.m. PDT, and Brandeau’s speech, Modeling and Simulation in Public Health, will be streamed starting at 11:30 a.m. PDT. You can tune in here.

Modeling and simulation aid our ability to understand the interrelationships of systems and how a change in one can affect others—which is an important building block in improving public health and health care.

Consider this disturbing situation: Some large American cities have so few supermarkets that they’re considered “food deserts.” There’s actually an abundance of food in these places, but it’s the wrong kind. It comes in the form of fast food in restaurants or processed food in small shops—not the abundant, affordable fresh fruits, vegetables, and other fresh provisions that people need to remain healthy. For instance, Detroit, a city with a population of nearly 1 million, has no major supermarkets. Meanwhile, it has more than 400 liquor stores.

This difficulty in getting fresh food is a major cause of America’s obesity problem–where roughly one-third of Americans are obese. Obesity, of course, is a contributing factor in a wide array of maladies, including heart disease and high blood pressure. But why can’t people get healthy food? There are many causes. Crime is a factor in the paucity of supermarkets in the inner cities. And poor public transportation systems make it difficult for city residents to travel to a fully-stocked store. Meanwhile, advertising drives people toward poor food choices. So you can begin to see how truly vast and complex is the health ecosystem. “It’s easy to tell people to eat less and exercise more, but the situation is complex. You have to take into consideration genetics, socio-economic factors, location, and social influences,” says Paul Maglio, manager of smarter planet service systems at IBM Research.

Knowledge about how these factors interrelate is crucial to policy makers and leaders in government, the health care industry, and other participants in the health ecosystem. This is where modeling and simulation come in. Today, decisions that affect health are typically made based on looking at a single system in isolation. Even when researchers gather data and build models for analyzing it, they look at systems as if they stand alone. Maglio, database management researcher Pat Selinger, and a handful of other IBM scientists have embarked on an effort to make it possible for stakeholders in a nation’s health to share data and create integrated models that can provide holistic views of how the world works. “Everything is connected to everything. If you change one piece, everything else needs to reconfigure. It’s like a spreadsheet where every value needs to recalculate every time something changes,” explains Selinger.

Technorati Tags: data, health, IBM, modeling, simulation, Smarter Healthcare

I recently sat down with Wayne Balta, IBM’s VP of corporate environmental affairs and product safety, to talk about a new program to advance sustainability across the company’s huge network of almost 30,000 suppliers in 90 countries. We talked about how a company can help the environment beyond the walls of its own business:

Q: Ten years, ago, we never could have predicted the current state of global sustainability efforts. What are some trends you’re seeing today?

Balta: We’re seeing more activity in areas where business interests intersect with the environment and sustainability. More companies are realizing that what is good for the environment is good for business, especially when it makes a company more efficient and effective. A case in point: if you produce a product — anything from hula hoops to heavy machinery — if you do it in a way that is more efficient, you’ll consume less energy, save money on energy costs, and lessen your contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. We’re seeing this across all industries.

Q: One place a company can make an impact is in its supply chain. Can a company’s purchasing power be translated into better environmental policies?

Balta: Absolutely — we’ve certainly seen that at IBM. This dates back to the 1970s, when IBM was evaluating companies performing waste management and recycling. In 1998, we wrote to our suppliers to encourage them to adopt the new ISO 14001 standard for environmental management systems. Then, in 2004 we published the IBM Supplier Conduct Principles that suppliers were required to follow in order to do business with IBM. Those standards set IBM’s overall expectations for corporate responsibility, because suppliers are a key component of a company’s sustainability efforts.

Q: What is IBM asking its suppliers to do in 2010?

Balta: Starting this year, we are asking each of our suppliers to define an environmental management system suitable to their particular business operations. We’re asking them to establish voluntary environmental goals and measure performance for at least three topics applicable to virtually all businesses: energy conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste management/recycling. In addition, we’re asking them to publicly disclose their results. We’re also asking that these requirements be cascaded down to any of their suppliers who perform work for them that is material to what is ultimately supplied to IBM. So this program will fan out among our suppliers’ suppliers, spreading its impact even further.

Q: I see you are not issuing a blanket mandate. What’s the reason for that?

Balta: A key aspect of this program is that we want suppliers to create a management system that works for their particular business operations. Since our suppliers are diverse, there cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution. Some are huge publically-traded companies while others may be small businesses with much fewer employees. We want them all to build long-term sustainability in a way that is integral to their routine operations, not as an add-on fix.

As we set these new requirements, let me point out that we are not going to publicly “grade” suppliers. This is a carrot, not a stick approach. Our goal is to help them improve their businesses, whether they work with IBM or someone else. We want them to succeed.

Q: Can you give me a few examples of what suppliers could do?

Balta: It varies. Chemicals used for manufacturing must be properly managed from inception through final use and disposition. Products and components can be designed for the environment, considering material selection, energy intensity, and recycling at end-of-life. Even service operations such as call centers can be energy-intensive.

Take the electronics industry, which supplies IBM with components for our servers. As an example, we want them to use environmentally preferable materials. However, that doesn’t happen overnight, and a supplier must put a system in place to phase out a particular material or manufacturing process.

For a services oriented supplier, its environmental management system might identify energy consumption as a significant issue. Upon recognizing that, the supplier might do things like install motion detectors so lights automatically shut off when rooms are not occupied, or installing energy-efficient light bulbs or energy-saving settings on computers. For a shipping company, their routes might be redesigned to save fuel.

Q: Aren’t some suppliers already doing this?

Balta: Indeed, many of IBM’s suppliers already have such systems in place and for them these requirements may not represent anything substantially different from the way they already manage their businesses. For others, however, this approach may be relatively new. Some suppliers may need help and we look forward to helping them succeed.

There is another dimension. In our era of globalization, we find ourselves working with suppliers from all over the world. In fact, the executive who oversees IBM’s supply chain, John Paterson, is based in Hong Kong. We’re finding that suppliers are at different stages of development and sophistication in terms of their understanding of sustainability and environment impact. While these requirements may seem like old news in mature economies, attention to these matter in emerging markets has not been great over the years. It’s very important for suppliers in those markets to get the help they need to put the right systems in place.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Balta: Our world is a system of systems — we’re seeing that in IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, where cities around the world are creating systems to make water cleaner, roads less congested, and populations healthier. That’s what we are doing here; helping suppliers build systems so that they can be sustainable and succeed.

Technorati Tags: environment, environmental, sustainability

By Paul Chang
In the U.S. alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 76 million Americans are sickened each year by food-borne illnesses, leading to the hospitalization of 325,000 people and causing 5,000 deaths. A study that was published a few weeks ago by the Produce Safety Project at Georgetown University reports that the health-related costs of food-borne illnesses – including medical bills, lost wages and lost productivity – total US $152 billion a year in the U.S. alone. Of course, food safety is a global problem. In Australia, for example, OzFoodNet estimates that 5.4 million cases of food borne disease occur annually in the country of 20 million people leading to approximately 18,000 hospitalization and 120 deaths, with an annual cost to society of AU$1.2 billion.

It’s not just the cost of food-borne sicknesses that is troubling, or even the frequency of these outbreaks. It’s the difficulty retailers and authorities around the world have in identifying the causes in a speedy manner; tainted food sometimes stays on store shelves and in our kitchens for too long. In addition, the current antiquated “system” of inspecting processing facilities once every few years is simply not frequent nor reliable enough.

The good news is that by using instrumentation such as sensors and barcodes, interconnection through the Internet, and new information management and analytic tools, food can now be traced from farms to supermarkets. Although the technology adoption has been limited on a worldwide basis, a growing number of countries and businesses are successfully using it. That’s why I am in Thailand this week. Today, at an agricultural industry event being held in Nonthaburi, a city outside Bangkok, the country’s Minister of Agriculture and Cooperatives, Theera Wongsamut announced a major program aimed at making Thailand’s agricultural products traceable from farms to retailers. Mr. Wongsamut said that beginning with about 600 farmers and agricultural exporters, his ministry would offer a new system based on open standards that will allow farmers and all their trading partners to access and share information on food including farm of origin, the type of feed used, date of harvest, and the like.

The idea behind the new system is twofold. First, it will help Thailand differentiate its agricultural exports in the marketplace – a smart business decision. But the system also offers real societal benefits. If someone gets sick from a food that was imported from Thailand, it will be easy for a supermarket or public health authorities to determine exactly what farm the tainted food came from. This means recalls will happen much faster and potentially save many lives. And it means we can start reducing that staggering sums that are lost as a result of antiquated food safety systems.

We can’t prevent all food borne illnesses, but we can bring accountability to the actors, transparency to the supply chain, speed the process of uncovering their causes, and reduce their impact on public health and the food industry by building food tracking systems fit for the 21st century. By remotely monitoring the key events in a production process, applying business analytics, and identifying high risk scenarios, we can all make better use of the existing resources to prevent future outbreaks instead of merely reacting each time.

Paul Chang, worldwide business strategy, emerging technologies, is one of IBM’s top food and drug safety experts. Over the past few years, Paul has worked with major pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors globally to help them meet legislative mandates aimed at protecting consumers from counterfeit medications. More recently, he has helped food producers use sensors and barcodes to trace food from farms and manufacturing floors to retailers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related Links:
Food Safety News
Beginning Farmers
Quality Digest

Technorati Tags: cdc, centers for disease control, georgetown university, paul chang, Smarter Food, Smarter Planet, thailand

Ho Chi Minh City Credit: Andre Lettau

Ho Chi Minh City is engineered to accommodate about  three million people, but its population now tops 7 million–and it seems like half of them are riding motorbikes at any given time of day. So chaotic traffic was the first fact of life that struck members of a team of six IBMers when they landed in the city on Feb. 20 to begin the process of helping local leaders put together a plan for upgrading the city’s infrastructure. “The two-wheeler traffic was the highest I’ve seen on the planet,” marvels one of the IBMers, Guruduth Banavar, the former head of IBM Research in India.

Banavar, who is now the chief technology officer for IBM’s Public Sector business unit, was part of the team that spent three weeks in Ho Chi Minh City as part of IBM’s Corporate Service Corps. program. We send small groups of top-talent employees to emerging markets to help improve economic development, government services, and the like. The group that worked in Ho Chi Minh City was the first to be made up of executives. It was also the first to help a city in an emerging market look at all of its challenges holistically and come up with a master plan for taking them on. As a result of the engagement, Ho Chi Minh City and IBM have now formed a Smarter Cities alliance.

The city has adopted a 10-year redevelopment plan and will work with IBM on seven pilot programs in areas ranging from transportation to food safety. IBM will also help the city set up academic programs to prepare young Vietnamese to launch careers in technology services. “We think they can leapfrog their peers in other cities in eight to 10 years,” says Banavar.

One of the top priorities is dealing with traffic, of course. In one of the the pilot projects, IBMers will re-use a software tool developed in 2007 for analyzing traffic patterns in Singapore. They’ll monitor downtown Ho Chi Minh City traffic and create a model for predicting when intersections will clog–so the city can change traffic signals or deploy traffic cops to re-direct traffic and avoid grid-lock.

The lessons IBM learns in Vietnam will help it refine its approach to Smarter City projects in developing nations. One of the challenges that the government of Ho Chi Minh City has to overcome is the fact that there’s little coordination between the city’s government bureaus. Yet the systems they oversee, from traffic to water to electricity to public safety, area all interrelated. One of the goals of the new city plan is to bridge between the departments with coordinated strategies and shared data. These insights will be useful in other emerging-market cities, as well. “We can help change the governance structure of cities,” says Banavar.

As you may have noticed from the last post, IBM’s Sam Palmisano visited the Chatham House stage in London today having delivered a speech titled ‘Welcome to the Decade of Smart.’ Throughout tonight (and over the coming days) we will be posting content and links to images and video from the event here, as they become available.

From the post-event materials being distributed:

On January 12, 2010, Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officers, addressed business and civic leaders at Chatham House in London. In his remarks, he described how forward-thinking leaders in business, government and civil society around the world are capturing the potential of smarter systems to achieve economic growth, near-term efficiency, sustainable development and societal progress.

Links:

Launch a video of the speech: Sam Palmisano at Chatham House

Launch a video of the Q&A from Chatham House: Q&A from Chatham House

Today, Steve Lohr of the New York Times published a brief article about the speech that takes a look at the past year of Smarter Planet work from IBM.

Paul Glader of the Wall Street Journal published an article today as well that examines aspects of IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative.

Technorati Tags: chatham, decade, london, Palmisano, Smarter Planet

Technorati Tags: bloomberg, new york city, Smart Cities, Smarter Cities, smarter city