By Andreas Fuchs, co-project leader, Electric Mobility, EKZ, Kanton Zürich, Switzerland

It is estimated that by 2050, 95 percent of cars will be equipped with an electric socket. This will mean that more than five million parking lots in Switzerland alone will be need to be equipped with a charging station to enable electric vehicle (EV) charging. Now imagine if all of these cars began charging at the same time and the impact it would have on the power grid.

While the electrical grid in Switzerland is not yet “smart,” the fact remains that EVs are being purchased. It is therefore, up to the auto manufacturers, utilities and equipment suppliers to ensure that the charging process is coordinated and controlled in order to prevent grid overload.

This was the driving incentive behind the Smartphone application (app) pilot that we are conducting with IBM Research in Zürich and the University of Applied Research Zürich in Winterthur, ZHAW. The goal is to study how mobile communication can be used to remotely control the EV charging process.

As you can read here and watch here – the driver can set boundary conditions for the charging process, using a smartphone, such as immediate or later charging, or delegate the charging responsibility to the utility. From this point, a charge schedule is created based on the availability of renewable resources such as sun and wind, as well as current grid conditions.

The main menu

Image 1: The Main Menu

In the graphic above you can see the interface for the app, which is web based and works on all of the latest smartphones and tablets.  Going in an counter-clockwise direction:

• Starting on the lower right edge: “Vehicle” one can choose which EV they plan to drive.  This could be particularly useful for car sharing programs or for managing an EV fleet of cars, similar to what we have at EKZ.
• On top to the left: The battery state of charge and an estimation of the remaining range in kilometers is displayed.
• On top to the right: Users can see a GPS map showing the locationof the EV in relation to the closest charging stations (data by www.lemnet.org).

• Bottom, to the left: This button offers EV drivers with the option to select from three charging modes – the first being “Immediate” which basically means that once plugged in, the car will begin to charge. For this project, the Twingo car was set with a default charging current that would provide drivers with a typical daily distance of 40km in Switzerland.
• The second charging option – “Premium” automatically shifts the charging period to the night. This will help avoid adding strain to the grid during the day, when most systems   are running.
• The third option – “Intelligent” allows the user to delegate the charging to the utility. Using a virtual power plant application, a utility can determine time of charge and load based on the charging history. For example, a car that is needs to be charged up to 85 percent at 4:30pm when the owner leaves for work.

Image 2: The blue rectangle during the night represents off-peak load charging of the electrical car.

Many companies are making in-roads in developing innovative technologies that have the potential to not only change how consumers get from A to B, but also change their level of interaction and control.

Image 3: The virtual power plant application calculates a “charging time table” that takes conflicting requirements into account, such as user preferences and available energy.

Before, consumers would just grab a set of keys and go – however, in the years to come, it will be a more connected experience. To prepare, many countries – especially in Europe, are implementing infrastructures to support the mass adoption of EVs – look no further than Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom or Ireland and of course Switzerland. We have the cars, now all we need is reliable energy, and the roads, charging stations, technology, as well as the consumers to keep up.

For more information: Visit http://www.klewel.com/conferences/iamf2012/ and http://www.klewel.com/conferences/iamf2012/

Join 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, smart grid, Smart Grids, smarter charging, Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet, Smarter Transportation, sustainability, transportation

By Jonathan Taplin
Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab
The University of Southern California

  As the parade of gowns and penguin suits made their way down the red carpet and into the Oscar awards ceremony last night, I had one eye glued to my TV and the other to my Twitter feed.

For more than three decades, my career in entertainment has spanned the worlds of music, film, technology and finance. As a long-standing member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, I always await this event with eager anticipation.

But this year I decided to marry my love of film, digital media and technology by applying science to the Oscars. Why?  I wanted to better understand how the public’s opinion of Oscar nominees stacks up against the actual winners on awards night.

Like many movie fans, not all of my favorite picks mirror the Academy’s choices, or those of the movie-going public for that matter.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I was shouting at the TV during the 2011 Oscar telecast when “The Social Network” didn’t take home Best Picture. That’s why the collaboration between our Lab, IBM and the LA Timesto create the Oscar ‘Senti-Meter’ was so groundbreaking.

Using advances in analytics and natural language processing, the Senti-Meter enabled us to analyze millions of daily public comments via Twitter, comparing volume and even more importantly assessing the tone. It let us pick up on positive, negative and neutral opinions, even snarky vs. sincere tweets about the best actor, actress and film nominees.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Like similar analyses by the Lab and IBM on fashion and sports, we’re now able to take advantage of technology to uncover hidden insights and better understand consumer sentiment.  It was a fun way to follow the Oscars horse race, for sure, adding a visual and entirely new dimension to reporting by the Los Angeles Times.  And it was also a terrific way for our students to gain highly sought skills in the latest technologies that will set them apart in the business world.

But this is about even more.  Social sentiment analysis can change the way movie studios typically operate by giving them the ability to quantify the types of movies and celebrities fans prefer. It can also help movie distributors better ensure box-office success by tailoring marketing campaigns to specific audiences. Studios can use this technology to help evolve the test screening and exit survey process that typically involves polling a much smaller sample size with predetermined questions. By adopting social analysis, the studios can cast a far wider net and gain more thoughtful and honest feedback.

I believe analytics is the next game changer for Hollywood.  These technology tools will influence entertainment content and dramatically impact the bottom line by using consumer sentiment to create future box office hits.

So you should be aware that as you were pecking out Tweets last night during the Oscars, you were participating in the early days of a grand experiment on how we’ll put all the data in our lives to work. From now on, via Twitter and other social media, the voices of movie fans will be amplified and will be “Extremely Loud”, but you won’t need to be “Incredibly Close” to the red carpet to be heard.

Jonathan Taplin is a Professor at The University of Southern California and the Director of the school’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. He is a member of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Annenberg Innovation Lab and IBM are collaborating on student-led research to apply analytics technologies to business.

Learn more about how IBM and USC are collaborating on analytics and social sentiment.

Read more about how the Oscar Senti-Meter project will impact the media and entertainment industries.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, communications, data, IBM, IBM Research, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, Watson

by Scott Stainken, General Manager of IBM’s Global Communications Industry

Next week my colleagues and I travel to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2012.  While there, we’ll be answering what we think are some of the most important questions being asked by smarter communications providers today.  Questions like…

…How can I increase campaign response rates? 

…How can I increase customer retention?

…How can I reduce time-to-market with cloud services? 

…How can I participate in the healthcare industry opportunity?

We’ll answer these questions with real-life customer stories that demonstrate how service providers are:

• Delivering smarter services to generate new sources of revenue faster.
• Transforming operations to achieve business and service excellence.
• Building smarter networks to optimize current and next-generation networks.

These are the imperatives we see emerging from our clients, and IBM believes the answers lie in three key enablers:

Advanced Analytics

Delivering smarter services requires pulling the vast amounts of consumer data available into a meaningful view of the customer.  By applying advanced analytics, a communications provider can create this view and map personalized service offers tailored to each subscriber by need.  Our clients are applying analytics with considerable success; we’ll be sharing many of their stories at MWC.

Cloud Technology

A next generation platform like cloud speeds design and deployment of smarter services.  Cloud makes it easier for communications companies to quickly expand their services offerings into new, rapidly growing verticals like healthcare, banking and government.  IBM has a complete portfolio of cloud solutions based on our clients’ deployment preference for private, public or hybrid cloud., and since launching in 2010, we’ve gained momentum helping service providers create, manage and monetize cloud-based services.

Security

The data explosion for mobile users will challenge the reliability of virtually all networks, and only after an organization has mitigated the risk to people, data, endpoints and infrastructure can it focus on empowering mobile employees.  With full mobile security, organizations are more agile and responsive, can generate new revenue, and facilitate the delivery and monetization of security threats.

On behalf of my fellow IBMers, we’re looking forward to seeing you in Barcelonanext week.  We’ll be exploring the answers to your questions in a private two-story courtyard pavilion.  This new home gives us a great venue for more intimate and focused conversations away from the distractions of the floor.  I hope you’ll come see us in the IBM Pavilion at 3.0 Courtyard CY23 armed with YOUR questions.

For more information on IBM’s participation at the even, visit our speakers and demonstrations.

Technorati Tags: communications, csp, GSMA, mobile, mwc, networks, scott-stainken, smarter-networks, smarter-telecom, smarter-telecommunications, stainken, telecom, telecommunications

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

Crucially, it’s not just a case of passively watching and listening to what citizens are saying. The social web also makes it possible to reach out in new ways. Social networks mean local government can carry out surveys – and publicise them – at relatively low cost. Insights gained in this way not only represent a significant cash saving; they can also be carried out more rapidly than traditional opinion polls, with no paper processing delays and no risk of data transcription errors.

The use of social media also opens up potential for enhanced cross-departmental collaboration within councils. Local government is a major employer: for example, Merton London Borough Council employs upwards of 5,000 people, as does Brent Council, while Birmingham City Council is the largest local authority in Europe, employing 60,000 people – the same size as a multinational company. Tapping into that resource makes sense and can unlock real value, with crowdsourcing creating synergies that would otherwise be lost.

Perhaps the most important aspect of social media, though, is the potential it has to open up public participation. Social media has a decisive role to play in motivating and empowering citizens, as well as increasing engagement with the third sector, which includes charities, voluntary groups and not-for-profit organisations.

As the Coventry project reveals, the online environment can be “sticky”, with users tending to spend longer perusing material than they might in an equivalent paper-based exercise. CovJam participants each spent an average of two and a half hours online.

CovJam underlines the extent to which social media and new technology can help to improve the agility of local authorities, with complex public consultations made far more manageable and granular than an equivalent approach based on filling in paper forms. Web-based technologies also have the potential to revolutionise routine public interactions. Research carried out by the Society of Information Technology Management in 2010 reveals the scope of potential savings. At only 27 pence, the cost of a customer service interaction on the web is nearly 11 times cheaper than a phone transaction and nearly 25 times less expensive than an equivalent face-to-face meeting.

This does not mean that governments should slash all paperbased services in favour of digital – such a move risks creating a digital divide and excluding those without access to the internet. By offering more digital channels, however, service can be improved and the public feels it has even more options.

Download the report

Watch Social Media Enabled Cities webinar

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, smarter city, Smarter Planet, social business

 
Engaging
It promotes citizen involvement and builds a new sense of
ownership with scope for collaboration in every aspect of city life.

Transparent
It lifts the bonnet on how the city works – processes are visible,
dialogue is open, feedback is swift.

Nimble
It delivers services in real time with an enhanced ability to adjust
to citizens’ fast-changing needs.

Secure
It respects privacy, protects data and leverages technology to
enhance the physical security of citizens.

Download the report

Watch Social Media Enabled Cities webinar

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet, social business

John Squire is IBM’s director of Digital Marketing and Analytics.

Updated Post
AN UPSET IN THE MAKING
3 February 2012, 11:30 AM Eastern

Just like on the field, Eli Manning is riding a late surge to overtake Tom Brady in the IBM and USC analysis of Super Bowl XLVI social media sentiment.  Overnight results of Super Bowl Twitter buzz drove Giants quarterback Eli Manning’s ‘T score’ for positive sentiment ahead of Tom Brady. Manning now leads with 66% vs. Brady’s 61%, which represents an 8-point shift compared to the previous day. In another interesting development positive sentiment for Giants head coach jumped dramatically with his score rating increasing to 76% positive. That places Coach Coughlin above all of the players and coaches on both teams.

This day-to-day shift in Super Bowl fan sentiment illustrates the speed at which consumer sentiments can shift online — a factor that businesses are watching closely due to the potential impact on their brand equity and sales.

By applying analytics in social media settings we can identify nuances – positive, negative, irony, snarky vs. sincerity, in real-time.  That’s enough time to help an organization, or in this case professional athletes, adjust their comments and actions to dramatically (and positively) impact their brands.

Original Post
SUPER BOWL ANALYSIS TAKES US BEYOND THE TWEETS
2 February 2012

One of the most dramatic NFL games ever played was Super Bowl XLII pitting the undefeated (18–0) New England Patriots led by record-setting quarterback Tom Brady against the surprising NY Giants with young, unproven Eli Manning at the helm.   A thrilling, some say shocking victory for the Giants ended the Patriots bid to be the only 19–0 undefeated champion in league history.  And now Super Bowl XLVI –  The Rematch —   anticipated to be the most watched American television show in history, promises to take social media to a whole new level.

As my colleague, and former NFL player Kevin Nosbusch posted on Wednesday, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab are conducting the first sentiment analysis of the two Super Bowl quarterbacks to illustrate how new analytics technologies make it possible to quickly assess the positive, negative and neutral sentiments shared by fans.

Why is this sentiment analysis important to IBM? In addition to being a longtime partner of the NFL, IBM recognizes that its clients, just like football players, are closely connected to their brand presence.

Using advances in analytics companies, academics, journalists can gain new insights into consumer perceptions via social media on endless topics from football and baseball to movies and retailing. Technologies can even distinguish irony and figure out which tweets are just background noise and those that are truly important.

Branding Upset on the Digital Playing Field

The Super Bowl analysis shows us that today the two quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Eli Manning are in statistical dead heat:  Brady earning 65% positive sentiment and Eli Manning earning 62% positive sentiment.  That actually represents a big branding upset on the digital playing field. Most sports and marketing followers would assume that Brady should be far ahead given his lofty status as an elite QB for many years and three championship rings.

Other noteworthy findings show that wide receivers have upstaged the quarterbacks, who are being positioned in the news media as the chief protagonists — Wes Welker is #1 in positive sentiment and Victor Cruz is a close 2nd.  Interestingly Brady leads by 3% points, exactly the point spread Las Vegas oddsmakers have favored the Patriots.

So while it looks like Tom Brady is going into the game as the Social MVP, now is not the time to get cocky.  Eli Manning is holding his own against the more experienced Brady in terms of positive sentiment.

The IBM USC analysis illustrates the potential insight and benefits that social media analytics can deliver to a brand — whether you’re an professional football player or a global enterprise.  Businesses that ignore the impact of social media will be stuck on the sidelines.

Learn more about IBM and USC AIL social media analysis projects.

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

When I played football at the University of Notre Dame and for the San Diego Chargers, broadcast television and radio were the primary ways fans enjoyed the game. There was no ESPN, no sports talk radio, the Internet was only known by DARPA scientists and social media didn’t exist.

Gosh, I sound pretty old. But in just 30 years the media and sports industries have been completely transformed by technology.  Today, fans are not only Tweeting about their favorite players and teams, but just last week at the Pro Bowl athletes were participating in the virtual conversation on the field at Twitter stations.

This week, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL) are conducting an analysis of social media trends related to Super Bowl Quarterbacks Tom Brady and Eli Manning.  By analyzing hundreds of thousands of public tweets they’ll determine the fans’ sentimental favorite – the people’s champion if you will.

Like previous analyses on movies, retailing and baseball, analytics makes it possible to understand positive, negative and neutral sentiments of social media commentary, distinguish irony, and even apply machine learning to figure out which tweets are just background noise and those that are truly important.  So we can now break down the Big Show’s compelling story lines in a way that traditional media never could.

Take the eternal New York/Boston sports rivalry. Is this a grudge match for the Patriots who had their perfect season ruined by the Giants four years ago?  Will Tom Brady be the first quarterback to win four Super Bowls since Joe Montana?  With his second Super Bowl in four years, has the Giants’ Eli Manning earned elite status and taken up his brother Peyton’s mantle as arch-rival of Tom Brady?   How will the family dynamic affect Eli Manning who will play on his brother’s turf in Indianapolis during Super Bowl XLVI?

Talk radio and sports columns are full of pundits and prognosticators discussing these topics ad nauseam. Coaches and players are focused on playbooks and game strategy. Organizations running commercials are waiting anxiously for consumer reaction. In this context, fans today have an opportunity to both share and learn from others instantly; and they’re providing researchers with an unfiltered voice that is ripe for analysis.

But this is about so much more than analyzing which QB fans are rooting for in Super Bowl XLVI.  Uncovering hidden insights from public Twitter comments can help a slew of people, from marketers to the NFL franchise owners, better understand opinions toward players, teams and products.  These opinions can no longer go unnoticed, which is why the NFL has wisely established a Super Bowl Social Media Command Center.

We can see from the work that IBM and USC are doing that this notion of shared community engagement continues to expand exponentially thanks to other social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube. In this context, sentiment analysis can be applied to learning how consumers perceive brands, reputations of companies and organizations, and new television shows and movies – just to name a few.

So which quarterback will be the social MVP of Super Bowl XLVI?  We’ll find out later this week.

In the meantime, the data that IBM and USC are gathering affirms what I’ve known since my playing days — statistics are an important part of sports.  And today gathering social media data can be a powerful tool that impacts the bottom lines for businesses of all sizes in all industries.

• Learn more about IBM and USC AIL social media analysis projects.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, data, Education, IBM, IBM Research, picture stories, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, Watson

Discovery techniques based on social media are already helping local authorities to shape the future and to define exactly what a smarter city should look like. Coventry in the UK’s West Midlands is a case in point.

CovJam is a collaborative online venture staged by Coventry City Council and IBM. It used social media as part of a unique three-day brainstorming exercise to identify ways to make Coventry a smarter city.

IBM’s “jam” technology is a proven technique for drawing on the wisdom of crowds, capturing ideas in a way that isn’t possible using traditional forms of consultation. CovJam generated more than 2,000 posts, with 82 per cent of re-registered participants, including residents, public-sector organisations and companies, taking part.

Following the event, IBM used corporate brand and reputation analysis to organise the unstructured information, identify patterns and to help the city council to prioritise key topics and viewpoints. For the council, CovJam provided new ideas; for local people and businesses, it provided an easily accessible opportunity for people to become active citizens.

As well as providing a channel for capturing and analysing realtime information, social media provides a critical feedback mechanism, with citizens able to report on everything from road closures to broken water mains. Commuters can also provide feedback after an incident or event is reported, using the social web including Twitter, blogs and forums.

Social media also has a unique capacity to capture the mood of the moment and to spur powerful, impromptu actions. That can have both a positive and negative impact: social media may have been used by some rioters to organise criminal activity during the disturbances that took place in English cities during the summer of 2011. Yet the same social media helped to galvanise the unprecedented community response that followed.  An account on Twitter – @riotcleanup – attracted more than 70,000 followers in a matter of hours, with residents turning out to help in the clean-up operation across the country.

Download the paper

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet, social business

by Richard Daley, Director of Information Management at Tejon Ranch

Mobile business applications on phones and other hand-held devices are taking hold in the business today, and Tejon Ranch is a great example of how that technology is making a big difference.

Our name is a bit deceiving. We’re more of a city than a “ranch.”

We have nearly 270,000 acres, which makes us the largest continuous expanse of private land in California. With 422 square miles, we’re almost as large as Los Angeles and about 40 percent the size of Rhode Island. Our current projects include Tejon Industrial Complex, a 1,450-acre commercial/industrial park; Tejon Mountain Village, a resort community of 26,400 acres; and Centennial, a 12,000-acre planned city with 23,000 housing units.

With so much land to traverse, our employees needed a mobile solution when they’re off-site to access key information and collaborate across the organization Our employees now use their mobile application on iPads to take advantage of key content and case management capabilities remotely for all parts of our business including contracts management, insurance verification, and bond management.

Tejon Ranch has a mobile application that enables iPad users to take advantage of key content and case management capabilities remotely to provide real time access key records and information, drive dynamic collaboration and agile decision making across the organization. This covers areas such as contracts management and insurance verification across 5,000 consultants and managing access to bonds for general use improvements and building projects.

Now that we’re “mobile,” we’re doing three times as much with our systems now as we did previously, but we’ve only added two staff members to the IT team. We predict a three-year ROI of $4 million using IBM, but as for the value in terms of transforming the way we do business, that’s beyond calculation.

It wasn’t too long ago that we had only a manual, paper-based records management system to manage our growth. Back then our businesses were operating as separate, siloed entities. Employees used paper for their work processes and stored this information in boxes, folders and notebooks.

Using IBM software, we can now maneuver contracts through the office more easily to make sure insurance certificates are updated and pro-actively notify our workers and consultants when their insurance needs to be updated or reissued. Dynamic tasks can be set to ensure insurance verification is obtained or appropriate action is taken. And all this information is accessible via iPads.

As a public company, Tejon also has to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA and is subject to audits by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  The iPad application allows knowledge workers to access critical content, make decisions and collaborate in real time while ensuring that compliance objectives are met by managing content as records, regardless of format.

Our long-term goal is to build our IBM solution out to the 5,000 remote consultants and vendors we work with on a daily basis, providing a way for them  to directly contribute content to the Tejon solution and collaborate with the Tejon team.

Technorati Tags: mobile, tejon ranch