Troy Kanter, COO of Kenexa, an IBM company
By Troy Kanter
Successful organizations typically recognize three critical facets of their workforce. For these companies, it’s all about capability (what the workforce already knows); capacity (what it has the ability to learn); and culture (what it can do collectively).
Understanding the three C’s is just the first step in the process of creating a Smarter Workforce. In my experience, it’s critical to answer five key questions regarding the design of the workforce to help ensure success, both for the employee and the organization.
1. What are the core components that are critical to the success of your organization?
Much like buying a car, what feature or capability denotes a successful purchase? Is it safety, gas mileage, speed or something else? It’s the same with business. For some companies, they need their workforce to deliver tailored solutions for customers. For others, it’s important to deliver top-of-line customer service, or expertise or creative ideas. Continue Reading »
Michael Zerbs,Vice President, IBM Risk Analytics
By Michael Zerbs
Sensitivity around risk management is no longer solely a concern for large financial services organizations. In an economy still freshly scarred by the global financial crisis, what we are seeing is a pervasive questioning of the fundamental assumptions that large organizations, and individual investors so easily took for granted pre-crisis.
Questions that are now top of mind include, do I fully understand risk exposures across my organization? Can I trust my governance processes to sufficiently ensure accurate risk reporting? Can I accurately quantify the riskiness of a transaction? And, is my point of reference for riskiness really reliable? Continue Reading »
Werner Kruck, Chief Operating Officer, Security First Insurance Company
By Werner Kruck
You may think of Twitter and Facebook as a way to catch up on the latest gossip, but social media often becomes a critical lifeline and communications channel after a natural disaster. In addition to using it to locate loved ones, friends and emergency resources, people affected by a natural disaster often turn to social media to contact their insurance company for information and to start the claims process. Homeowners insurance companies must prepare for the reality that today’s policyholders will use any means available to connect with them, including posting a question or comment on the company’s Facebook page or Twitter account. Continue Reading »
Robert Fox, Global Telecom, Media and Entertainment Industry Leader
IBM Global Business Services
By Robert Fox
Cut throat competitiveness has been with the telecom industry since its inception nearly 140 years ago when Alexander Graham Bell beat Elisha Gray in a race to the U.S. Patent Office to lay claim to inventing the telephone.
Fast forward to today and we see a highly complex, competitive telecom environment where voice services have taken a back seat to a growing range of data-intensive services such as streaming music, radio and video, high definition video, online gaming and social media.
Transporting all of this data through their networks is resulting in shrinking margins and network congestion for the carriers. But don’t hang up on them yet! Mindful of protecting customers’ privacy and preserving their trust, many of the carriers are annonymizing their data, or offering opt-in programs, as they start to embrace and leverage advanced analytics for competitive advantage.
A new IBM study on how telcos are using Big Data highlights this trend: 85 percent of the respondents indicate that the use of information and analytics is creating a competitive advantage for them – a 124 percent increase in the last two years. Continue Reading »
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Deepak Advani, General Manager, Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure, IBM
By Deepak Advani
The Internet Age has made it possible for dramatic amounts of information to be available at our fingertips. And as capacity expands and accessibility grows, we push ever closer to the Internet-of-things, where our physical and digital worlds are tightly coupled and leveraged.
With the ability to generate, share, store and access increasing amounts of data – Big Data – the challenge soon becomes one of management and analysis. Left alone, the mountains of seemingly disparate information are useless. But when mined intelligently, they become treasure troves of insight that can unlock benefits, such as improved customer service, equipment-saving predictive maintenance, and new business opportunities, to name a few. Continue Reading »
Christian Bieck, IBM Institute for Business Value, Insurance Leader
By Christian Bieck
The most urgent and strategic initiative that I currently discuss with insurers is that of “Customer Centricity.” That’s because a lot of insurers are having a hard time understanding their customers, many of whom are becoming multi-modal.
A multi-modal customer is one who interacts with a provider through a variety of modes – or interaction points – i.e., face-to-face, phone, websites or aggregators. Often, a multi-modal customer will not purchase a product or service from the interaction point they used to collect information and gather a quote.
Finding success in today’s environment means that insurers must present the right data, information and offers to the right customers, at the right time, and through the right interaction points – many of which are digital.
(Fourth in a series in support of Big Data Week.) Continue Reading »
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Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM Master Inventor
Andy Stanford-Clark, an IBM Master Inventor who lives in the United Kingdom, jokes that his goal was “world domination” in 1999 when he and Arlen Nipper of Eurotech invented a protocol aimed at greatly improving machine-to-machine communications. This was at the time when another British technology pioneer, Kevin Ashton, coined the term “Internet of Things” to describe how the Internet could be connected to the physical world via a vast network of sensors. Stanford-Clark believed that his protocol, now called MQ Telemetry Transport, or MQTT for short, would enable organizations to quickly and affordably gather, integrate and make use of all of that sensor data. It would be an essential underlying technology for the Internet of Things. Continue Reading »
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David McQueeney, Vice President, Technical Strategy and Worldwide Operations, IBM
By David McQueeney
Five years ago, IBM launched its Smarter Planet initiative, describing the era in which we currently live and operate in as the “Era of Smart,” one marked by forward-thinking leaders in business, government and society capitalizing on smarter systems to achieve economic growth, operational efficiency and sustainable development.
Since 2008, we have moved beyond the world of programmable systems to our first steps in cognitive systems – systems that exploit large data sources and can “learn.” Our Watson system may highlight this new way of operating best. For the first time, a computer has the ability to consult a broad range of human language resources, learn from historical training data, and answer surprisingly complex questions. We are forced to rethink how computers can work with humans on complex tasks, by showing the world a system that is able to respond based on what it ‘knows’ – facts and information and training – rather than simply what words match in a simple search.
(Third in a series in support of Big Data Week.) Continue Reading »
Timothy J. Wholey, Global Leader, Aerospace & Defense Industry, IBM Global Business Services
By Timothy J. Wholey
We live in a world that’s exploding with data. From smartphones and social networks, to airplane instrumentation and atmospheric readings, we capture more data, more quickly than ever before. It’s estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated on the planet every day.
This incredible amount of data creates challenges and opportunities for organizations, particularly in the aviation industry, because of the volume and variety of data it generates. Air traffic demand is expected to triple over the next 20 years, with passenger aircraft and fleets doubling during that time.
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First in a series in support of Big Data Week) Continue Reading »
Terry F. Yosie, President and CEO of the World Environment Center
By Terry F. Yosie
Environmental issues are big, thorny problems. Scarcities in water, food and raw materials are too complex for any single company or non-governmental organization to solve on its own. In order to make a difference, it’s necessary to collaborate with like-minded partners to achieve shared goals.
Collaboration is a normal feature of customer-supplier relationships, government-business partnerships and initiatives with universities and other partners. It’s also typical for organizations looking for new business models that can sustain profitability while addressing societal needs, natural resource management, product and service innovation, and differentiation of brand value, to name a few. Collaboration can spur organizations to redefine their business purpose by utilizing society as another kind of R&D lab for innovation. Continue Reading »
