When the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami struck Japan last March, the disaster killed more than 15,000 people and caused immeasurable property damage. It also seriously damaged the reputation of science. The Japanese people had been assured by scientists that their nuclear reactors were safe and that they were well protected from the threat of tsunamis.
IBM Research-Tokyo has taken on the mission of helping to better understand and react to natural disasters. But that’s not all. “In addition to responding to the disaster, one of our biggest concerns is repairing the image of science,” says Norishige Morimoto, director of the Tokyo lab. “We want to show people that science and technology aren’t just for improving efficiency and corporate profits. They can and should contribute to the quality of life and to society.”
Morimoto, who has been the lab director since 2009, uses the term “resilient society” to describe the broader benefits that science can deliver through better access to data and understanding of data, and sophisticated analysis that can lead to better decision making at the time of the emergency. Innovation for a Resilient Society is the theme of the IBM Research Colloquium that the lab is conducting today at Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. The Colloquium is an IBM Centennial program designed to convene at IBM Research labs thought leaders – including leading researchers and scientists, academics, public policy makers and key IBM clients — for a series of talks and panel discussions on future, transformative technologies and platforms and their potential impact on the world. In addition to Morimoto, leading thinkers from IBM, academia and industry will speak to an audience of more than 100 leaders in society about the future of space exploration, healthcare, transportation and society.
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Two and a half years ago, when IBM launched its Smarter Planet strategy, it calculated that the move would expand its available market by 40%. Suddenly, the company was developing new technology-based solutions capable of helping to transform the way complex systems, large organizations, industries, cities and even whole societies work. But how do you measure the impact of this kind of activity?
Not by traditional methods that are commonly used in the tech industry. They measure the return on investment in new technology products and services–mostly operational efficiencies within the IT department and productivity gains throughout the business.
So what’s needed is a new way of thinking about the impact of technology–going beyond traditional return on investment, commonly called ROI. Tech market research consulting firm Forrester Consulting and IBM have been working together for nearly two years on a new theory and methodology for evaluating the potential gains from Smarter Planet-type projects–an approach they call Expanded Value for Smarter Planet. “One of the important elements of Smarter Planet is you’re looking at the impact of investments on a whole system. You’re looking not just at internal operational improvements but at the effect on the company’s brand, at strategic advantages it brings and even at the impact on society,” says Jon Erickson, an a principal consultant with Forrester Consulting.
The first results of this work are coming out now, in form of three reports. They include two case studies, one about law enforcement and the other about healthcare. An overview, Measuring the Total Economic Impact of IBM Smarter Planet Solutions, will be published soon.
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This is the second in a series of three essays about the potential payoff from applying Smarter Planet thinking to businesses. The first essay can be found here. The third will be published on July 29.
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IBM has plenty of company when it comes to deep concern and deep thinking about the future of cities. Today, at the Intelligent Cities Forum in Washington, D.C., hundreds of urban planners, city leaders and data mavens are gathering to share insights on ways to make cities more successful and sustainable using data, analytics, collaboration and foresight. The A Smarter Planet blog will feature live blogging from the event, so please return here frequently to see updates.
To see a live video of the event, click here. To learn more about the event, click here. To follow or participate via Twitter, use #icities.
Anne Altman, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM, talks about why cities are so important to having a sustainable planet.
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IBM has plenty of company when it comes to deep concern and deep thinking about the future of cities. Monday, at the Intelligent Cities Forum in Washington, D.C., hundreds of urban planners, city leaders and data mavens will gather to share insights on ways to make cities more successful and sustainable using data, analytics, collaboration and foresight. The A Smarter Planet blog will feature live blogging from the event, so please return here frequently to see updates.
To see a live video of the event, click here. To learn more about the event, click here. To follow or participate via Twitter, use #icities.
IBM uses the term smarter cities. It’s an essential piece of the overall Smarter Planet strategy. The company believes that smarter cities drive sustainable economic growth by leveraging information to make better decisions, coordinating resources to operate more effectively and anticipating problems so they can be resolved before they get too big. If cities manage their knowledge wisely and aggressively, they’ll become better places to live and will create abundant economic opportunities for their citizens in a rapidly changing world.
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By Steve White, President/CEO of UnifiedEdge
An activated emergency management operations center is typically a busy, noisy and chaotic work environment. With radios blaring, phones ringing, and unfamiliar personnel needing close attention, emergency management leadership often find it difficult to communicate effectively while directing the response to the crisis at hand.
This was a typical situation in the emergency response center in the City of Fort Worth, Texas.
To help better protect its citizens, the City of Fort Worth in 2008 began efforts to build a new Joint Emergency Operations Center (JEOC) facility with their Tarrant County emergency management counterparts. The JEOC would one day become the command and control center for event and crisis response coordination across the region and its 1.8 million constituents. Along with physical building and process oriented needs, Office of Emergency Management (OEM) personnel knew they needed to shore up their ‘communication’ capabilities. Continue Reading »
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vineeta durani in
President Obama’s first visit, as president, to South America this past weekend is a reminder of the changing nature of U.S. relationships with the world’s fastest-growing economies — and a potent reminder of how the U.S. is driving the world’s most advanced new forms of infrastructure.
One of IBM’s most recent projects stands as a powerful example of the shared values and enormous opportunity this area of the world represents to the United States — the new Rio Operations Center combines data from various urban systems for real-time visualization, monitoring and analysis to improve safety and responsiveness. It’s an ambitious initiative that moves beyond single-purpose programs, such as a congestion pricing schemes or water management, to a unified system that spans across government agencies. For example, it will provide a weather monitoring system that will allow first responders to send people, supplies and vehicles to danger areas and put hospitals and officials on alert before natural disasters even occur.
Read more about the effort from IBM’s Chief Technology Officer for Smarter Cities, Guru Banavar, at Government Technology online.
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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.
Following a series of floods and mudslides that claimed the lives of 100 people back in April 2010, Rio de Janeiro announced a significant overhaul of its city operations – a big step in preparing for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. The city is collaborating with IBM on a multi-million dollar plan including a “City Center” that will help meteorologists, geological surveyors, field operations and security work together to dramatically speed emergency responsiveness. Not only will this system help city organizations “talk” to each other more effectively, but it will also ensure that each department knows what to do with real-time information.
For instance, when alerted that a tropical storm is on the way, the system will proactively address questions, including: Which streets will require the most troops? Which hills are most prone to mud slides? Are their shelters that have vacancies? Which hospitals have beds available? What is the best way to exit from a soccer match at the Maracana? How should officials direct traffic coming from the Copacabana Beach? Rio will exemplify the Smarter Cities vision, which involves connecting core city systems, eliminating operational silos and ensuring that cities remain prosperous and sustainable in the face of unprecedented urban growth.
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- Analytics
- Education
- Government Services
- Smart Grids
- Smart People
- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
- Smarter Communications
- Smarter Energy
- Smarter Healthcare
- Smarter Planet
- Smarter Public Safety
- Smarter Systems
- Smarter Traffic
- Smarter Transportation
- Smarter Utilities
- Smarter Water
- Smarter Water Management
- Smarter Work
- urban planning
Game fanatics have been enjoying simulation games ever since SimCity was first introduced in 1989, and electronic games are used for military and corporate training, but IBMer Phaedra Boinodiris designs so-called serious games to help people solve complex business and social problems.
Today, IBM is releasing her latest creation, CityOne, an on-line game that can help city leaders, businesses, and students figure out how to make cities work better by simulating transportation, environmental, business and logistical problems. The free game challenges players to complete missions involving energy, water, banking, and retailing. “It’s like an onion,” she says. “You can jump in and play it for 20 minutes, or you can stay and go deep and learn how cities are actually using different technologies.”
If Boinodiris doesn’t seem like a prototypical IBMer, it’s because she’s not. She was previously an entrepreneur and founder of two companies–one an Internet game portal and the other a game consulting company. Both her parents are IBM retirees, though.
Fittingly, it was a game of sorts that brought Boinodiris and IBM together. Three years ago, when she was studying for an MBA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she participated in a business case competition versus another university. The task, posed by IBM, was coming up with an innovative way to get business people interested in business-process management software. Her idea was to draw them in by designing an electronic game that would simulate how BPM software works in an imaginary business. One of her teammates was so sure that IBM would never accept a game as a solution that he up and quit the team on the spot. He was wrong. Sandy Carter, an IBM vice president in the software group who was one of the judges of the competition, liked the idea so much that she hired Boinodiris as an intern–with the task of designing the game she had proposed.
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City leaders are typically re-elected based on how well they fulfill basic needs such as making the buses run on time and fighting crime. So how do you get them to pay attention to long-term strategic considerations–especially at a time of economic hardship? That’s a challenge advocates of progress face as they try to convince leaders that strategic investments in the future will help their communities become or remain healthy over the long haul.
At IBM, we believe that taking advantage of advances in instrumentation, interconnectivity, and data analytics is an essential element of any city vitalization plan. One of the IBMers who is wrestling with the priority-setting issue is Rashik Parmar, an IBM distinguished engineer who heads up an initiative aimed at making Smarter Cities projects appealing to government leaders. He and some his colleagues, including distinguished engineer Colin Harrison and corporate strategist Martin Fleming, find that Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs (graphic above) is a good thinking aid.
Parmar points out that there are three drivers of action in communities that line up pretty well with the elements of Mazlov’s hierarchy. Issues: Fundamental things like crime and transportation that determine the livability of a city correspond with levels one and two. Investment: Government, non-profit, or commercial investments that build and maintain infrastructure line up with levels three and four. Inspiration: The creation of a unifying, shared vision that defines the path to a “better place” corresponds to level five–peak experiences.
The winning argument in favor of strategic investments comes when you can point to long-term improvements in livability that result in part from fulfilling aspirational needs. Academic Richard Florida in his Creative Class writings makes the argument in a general sense: The cities that are most successful are the ones that attract and retain artists, scientists, and other kinds of innovators. Can anybody point to strong data proof points in your city that back up this argument? If so, please weigh in.
I was struck today by a Thomas Friedman’s column today in the New York Times. He’s writing about the Tea Party and it’s angry demands for less government and lower taxes. I don’t want to get into the politics of the column, but one of his observations about what he sees as a necessity for the United States also applies to cities. He calls for a plan to revitalize the nation:
“To me, that is a plan that starts by asking: what is America’s core competency and strategic advantage, and how do we nurture it? Answer: It is our ability to attract, develop and unleash creative talent. That means men and women who invent, build and sell more goods and services that make people’s lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, secure and entertained than any other country.”
To me, these are the questions that city leaders ought to be asking themselves, as well. I believe that the bold and smart ones among them will make the plans and investments now that will pay off a decade from now, and pay dividends for many years into the future.
But, easy for me to say…
What do you think? How do city leaders go about asking the right questions? How do they find ways way to make the plans and investments that will result in Smarter Cities?
