Adam Gartenberg’s Blog

IBM Launches Health Analytics Center

Adam Gartenberg — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 16:55:20 -0400

IBM yesterday announced the launch of a Health Analytics Center in Dallas, Tx. From the press release:

DALLAS - 03 Nov 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the launch of its Health Analytics Solution Center, part of a network of global centers addressing the growing demand for advanced analytics needed to help hospitals and medical staff improve decision-making and provide higher quality care.

The center will be hosted in the IBM Global Solution Center in Dallas and will employ more than 100 health analytics experts, technical architects and specialists, with access to hundreds more health industry experts from across IBM, including experts from IBM's Business Analytics and Optimization consulting organization and IBM Research.
...
"Tapping into mountains of data within hospitals and clinics can provide powerful new insight into what's working and what isn't," said Dwight Carter, CIO of the Dallas Fort Worth Hospital Council. "New analytics technology makes it possible to see important health trends and allow physicians and hospitals to design more effective treatments. As hospitals become more interconnected in the future, this will be an especially powerful tool for hospitals, physicians and patients alike."

IBM has opened or will be opening six other analytics solution centers in Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo, New York City, London and Washington, D.C. As part of this initiative, IBM expects to retrain or hire as many as 4,000 new analytics consultants and professionals globally.

Link: IBM Launches Health Analytics Center

Michael Osterman - Info Mgmt and Lotus observations from IOD2009

Adam Gartenberg — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 14:26:31 -0400

Michael Osterman has posted his thoughts and observations on the IOD 2009 conference, some of which I've pulled in below. (On a personal note, after reading and citing his work for a while now, it was good to finally meet him in person as we both waited for the IOD press conference to begin.)

Thoughts on IBM’s Information on Demand Conference

The focus on content analytics across a wide range of areas. In the context of archiving, for example, IBM's Content Analyzer can scan file servers and other data sources for information and provide deep analytics to determine what needs to be archived as a precursor to the archiving process itself. An important feature of this is the ability to analyze content from a variety of structured and unstructured information types to find patterns, anomalies, etc. in the data.

IBM’s significant commitment to cloud computing across virtually every area in the company.

Some interesting approaches that are being taken to expanding the uptake of LotusLive, as well as some new capabilities that will be introduced in LotusLive in 2010.

IBM is getting good traction in the collaborative space using Lotus Connections with some very large organizations, including a 35,000-seat deployment that went into production last week.

IBM's internal microblogging capability went from 0 to 150,000 users in the first 10 weeks after its introduction.

There are currently 5,600 social communities across IBM representing various products, sciences and other groups.

Another good sign for IBM, and for the economy as a whole, is the fact that the conference was quite crowded – at least as crowded as last year’s.

> More

Marketing Thought of the Day: Ads That Add Value

Adam Gartenberg — Wed, 4 Nov 2009 10:59:17 -0400

It's a morning of writing for me, and I've got Pandora running in the background to keep me company.

I was impressed with the advertising Palm is doing on the site. As opposed to a static screenshot of the Pre, or a continuously looping demo, Palm is actually using their ad space to deliver value to me. They've used the UI to show a listing of upcoming concerts near me, complete with a clickable "more info" button that takes me to a page to buy tickets (not a redirect to Palm).

Well done, Palm and Pandora. Now how about your advertising? Is it delivering value to your viewers, or is it just pushing your point of view on them?

(Bonus tip of the day. I recently installed the TabMixPlus plug-in for Firefox, as I found I kept accidentally opening a new window on the Pandora tab, killing the music. It lets you protect or lock a tab, keeping the music playing.)

Additional news roundup from IOD2009

Adam Gartenberg — Tue, 3 Nov 2009 10:15:00 -0400

We're continuing to see news come in from the IOD 2009 Conference. Some highlights from the past week:

IBM is predicting that business analytics software will be one of 2010's hottest technologies, as companies attempt to squeeze as much value as possible out of their data.

- TheStreet.com

IBM is betting business analytics software will be the next big wave hitting IT in the next decade, as more companies seek to cut costs by plumbing and optimizing all the data they're sitting on.

- The Register

There is no doubt IBM has big plans for SPSS. It formed a new services arm dedicated to business analytics, staffing it with some 4,000 consultants. A key focus of the organization will be no doubt to push predictive analytics, which focus on determining future events and exploring "what-if" scenarios, versus generating reports from batches of historical data.

- PC World

"Information-led transformation has just begun," said Goyal. "We are way ahead, but to me we are just beginning, because everybody is going to follow us. I say this is bigger than ERP and CRM combined." He added: " . . . . Every day, clients are telling us what kind of problems they can’t solve." IBM had around 15,000 new clients in the business intelligence space, and Goyal said that it was looking ahead with a huge research department doing first of a kind projects.

- InformationWeek Global CIO Blog

IOD2009 in Interviews: Steve Mills, Rob Thomas, Mark Register, Maria Winans, Mary Garrett and many, many more

Adam Gartenberg — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:48:31 -0400

"There are two words that are stuck in my head in terms of where we are right now with technology and capability: real-time and predictive."
-- Steve Mills

While most people were busy attending sessions at the IOD2009 conference, developerWork's Scott Laningham was busy interviewing executives. Click below to listen to more thoughts from Steve Mills on the conference, and see the links below that for the rest of the interviews Scott conducted with those leading the information management and business analytics and optimization charge for IBM.

Information on Demand Channel on YouTube

Merv Adrian: A Tale Of Three Cities, and Oracle, Teradata and IBM Databases

Adam Gartenberg — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:28:41 -0400

Merv Adrian posts his thoughts on having spent October at Oracle, Teradata and IBM database events. His one-line summary: "Oracle took shots at IBM; Teradata put its successful customers on display; and IBM proposed ways to change the world for the better."

He expands on the approach of each company in a lot more detail in the post. On IBM, he writes:

IBM put an expanded Information Management leadership team on display to connect its story to the larger Smarter Planet message of the IBM Corporation. In this, they hit a home run. Steve Mills, Group Executive of the Software Group, waited until the second day to tell his story. Ambuj Goyal, General Manager, led off with a powerful message: IBM has spent $12B in the last few years acquiring, building (and steadily integrating) a portfolio of analytics software, 4000 consultants, the world’s largest private team of mathematicians dedicated to predictive analytics, and partners ready to drive information-led transformation. His colleague, Arvind Krishna, now also a GM with responsibility for the information platform (the data management products upon which the analytics depend) followed with a product story that includes new releases of databases, data integration, and other software that increasingly shares common elements for a more seamless integration across differing workloads and stewardship tasks. Mills returned the next day to build the link to the big picture, and he did it mostly through stories illustrating how customers are using IBM technologies to change the world – building new systems that pay for themselves with cost effectiveness and savings while delivering on the higher vision of the Smart Planet initiative.

I found his comments on IBM's tone interesting (and accurate) as well:

IBM resolutely avoided direct comparisons or attacks on its competition, even when specifically challenged to do so during executive Q&A sessions; its topline story was IBM’s increasing use of business process templates and industry models to accelerate time to value.

And here are his closing comments on IBM:

IBM, who grew database revenue in both Linux and Unix in 2008 according to Gartner, is lightyears ahead in defining an information-led transformation story based on a growing ability to drive improved information governance, and they have invested hugely in it as a strategic bet.

Merv was one of the speakers at the conference, as well - you can find my notes on his portion of the Day 3 General Session here, and I'd encourage you to check out his full post to see his perspective on Oracle, Teradata, and IBM.

Link: A Tale Of Three Cities, and Oracle, Teradata and IBM Databases

RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady on information-led transformation

Adam Gartenberg — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:15:52 -0400

Stephen O'Grady from RedMonk was out at IOD 2009 last week, and posted an interesting juxtaposition between Steve Mills' IOD 2009 keynote and Nate Silver's incredibly accurate baseball and political modeling (with regrets to all the Red Sox fans out there).

The central assertion of the post is that "[w]hat’s different these days is that we have exponentially more numbers than we did before, better tools to attack them, and an understanding that if you aren’t using the numbers to improve your business – every aspect of it – your competitors will."

When IBM’s head of Software Group Steve Mills talks, it’s usually in the vernacular of enterprise businesses, with a message tailored at same. Which makes sense; speaking in a language your customers understand is good business, and IBM’s been doing pretty well for itself recently. But one of his Monday comments at this week’s Information On Demand show in Las Vegas should, I think, be fairly universally appreciated. So much so that I’m inclined to believe that even Silver, whose business is a fair distance removed from enterprise software, would subscribe.

He said, in part, “that we’re moving into yet another wave of transformation.” More specifically, that “we’ve been living in a decade of process led transformation, and that we’re moving into an era of information led transformation.” Translated, the time of data driven decision making is at hand.

Link: IOD 2009: What Do Steve Mills and Nate Silver Have in Common?

Introducing the Information Agenda Catalog

Adam Gartenberg — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:06:39 -0700

Over the weekend a new Information Agenda catalog was launched, highlighting solutions and resources from IBM and IBM Business Partners across 18 industries and with a wide variety of specific functions within each industry.

I would encourage you to take a look, and to check back often for updates.

Link: ibm.com/imaccelerator

IOD2009 Day 2 Announcements: Analytics and Mashups

Adam Gartenberg — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:53:07 -0700

I've fallen behind in some of my blogging, notably on the announcements made yesterday at the IOD2009 Conference.

There were three press releases issued yesterday, focusing primarily on Analytics and Mashups. For now, here are links and some quick excerpts, please do click through to the full press releases for much more detail. I'll circle around at a later date with more detail on what was announced.

IBM Unveils New Offerings to Help Clients Better Manage Content With Analytics
Summary of the new solutions:

IBM Cognos Content Analytics: This new offering allows organizations to discover, refine and deliver new insights by analyzing unstructured enterprise content alongside structured data. Through focused navigation, users can identify trends and patterns and proactively detect anomalies for improved decision making.
IBM plans to expand the IBM Cognos Content Analytics family to include new solutions targeted at specific industries and business requirements. One solution currently being previewed centers around insight into consumer sentiment. This solution will be designed to help packaged goods companies gain a better understanding of what the market is saying about their brands on the "cloud" in blogs, wikis and media Web sites.
IBM InfoSphere Content Assessment: Using content analytics, this new offering helps organizations rapidly assess unmanaged content to identify high-risk and valued content such as corporate records that need to be secured, retained and managed throughout its lifespan. The software simultaneously detects unnecessary content eligible for decommissioning, creating the opportunity to dramatically reduce production system burdens and associated storage requirements.

New IBM Mashup Capabilities Bring Business Analytics to the Desktop

As part of its commitment to business analytics, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced an expansion of its industry leading enterprise mashup portfolio, including the latest version of IBM Mashup Center and a new offering called IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service. IBM is also announcing a set of new clients that are using IBM Mashup technology to help transform their organizations by using information as a strategic asset.

Read the full press release for details on how Wells Fargo, U.K.'s Kent County, AMEC Paragon and New York State Department of Labor are using mashups today.

Guinness Anchor Berhad Taps Into IBM Business Analytics To Boost Productivity

Guinness Anchor Berhad (GAB), Malaysia's leading brewery, has tapped IBM (NYSE:IBM) business analytics and performance management technology to significantly improve its decision-making process and business productivity.
GAB, the leader in Malaysia's beer and stout market with a 57% market share, sells well-known brands such as Tiger, Guinness, Heineken and Anchor. Despite its success, the company found that a collective total of 480 hours were spent by employees daily, gathering information for budgeting and planning, which took valuable time away from focusing on business objectives and driving revenue-generating activities.
...
With IBM business analytics, the entire budget planning process is now automated, eliminating potential errors arising from manual spreadsheet entries, ensuring that all information is accurate and can be quickly sent to stakeholders across the organization. The new analytics system also empowers budget-holders by giving them more control via continuous weekly or monthly reports while enabling scenario planning and what-if analysis of flexible rolling and profit and loss forecasts. IBM is also helping GAB better track performance against strategic objectives, and guarantees the quality and accuracy of financial numbers for timely, sustainable compliance.

Links:
IBM Unveils New Offerings to Help Clients Better Manage Content With Analytics
New IBM Mashup Capabilities Bring Business Analytics to the Desktop
Guinness Anchor Berhad Taps Into IBM Business Analytics To Boost Productivity

IOD2009 in Photos

Adam Gartenberg — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:43:24 -0700

Folks have been busy uploading pictures to the IOD2009 Flickr Group. (Thanks to Richard Hogg - @banjaxx - for the reminder and for uploading many of the photos.)

If you have photos to upload, please share!

What do you get the IT Superstar that has everything?

Adam Gartenberg — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:59:38 -0700

Is there an "IT Superstar" that's made a difference in your life? Have you said thank you to them lately? No?

Well, good news - showing your appreciation has never been easier. Just head on over here and send them a personalized (and fun) token of your appreciation.

Link: Make your favorite IT colleagues famous. Send a customized video now.

Live blogging IOD2009 Day 3 General Session (Merv Adrian, Malcolm Gladwell)

Adam Gartenberg — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:16:45 -0700

I will be live blogging the Day 3 IOD 2009 General Session. Check back in for updates during the session.

Today's host - Mark Register, VP Information on Demand, Asia Pecific

A couple of statistics. As of yesterday evening, we'd consumed 3,000 gallons of coffee. 1,900 tweets. Sharing Many Eyes visualization of the tweets from the conference. Can find the file out on many eyes. Question of the day on the IOD Smart Site. How much change is required in your organization? 39% responded "massive."

Today's focus is on leading the change.

Industry Analytst Merv Adrian coming to stage.

Am guessing didn't go into information management to lead change in company.

Showing top concerns of CIOs. BI tops CIO List - year after year, according to a multiyear Gartner study.

Here's a question - if we've been doing this so long, why aren't we done yet? We need to get someone else involved here other than power users. Why haven't we gotten there yet? Partly because not delivering on expectations. Heard Ambuj talk about it on day 1. For last decade or two, getting low hanging fruit. Automated business processes, and got really good at predicting the past. If you want to know why things went wrong last quarter, we can help you with that.

The reasons business not taking tools up is not enough - want something else. Want to improve operations, and expect business intelligence to help us get there.

Transformation is the new imperative

Information is the raw material
Recorded, specific executable process is the enabler
Analytics guide the priorities - and measure success or failure
Information professionals can lead now - in fact, we must.

These pieces form the basis for information-led transformation

Information Management trends are opportunities

Move logic closer to the data
Learn "Big Data" technicques
Drive compliance, security and privacy initiatives
Develop formal stewardship skills and organization.

And one more thing... become friends with your hardware guys. MPP, Cloud, Solid State Disk

Anton Langeler - Global IT Director, O'Neill coming to stage to join Mark Register. O'Neill - global organization providing surf, snow, lifestyle brands. Founded first surf shop in world in San Francisco in 1952.

Started MDM project 4 months ago, implemented in 30 days, it looks like IBM brought to the moon - to untouched ground. In principal, made him happy, but made all of their users (surfers) happy. Originally each country manager took data down to Excel, but have 26 countries in Europe, and each might have own language. 60,000 SKUs, 26 languages, more than 2-3 million entitities in data management before sending to Web.

Q: What role did information agenda approach have in achieving outcomes?
A: IBM came in, 55 interviews across organization. 80 different ERPs have to deal with. IBM, based on best practices and O'Neill's vision and roadmap, and interviews. Saw have possibility to grow business, reduce costs, streamline processes. Easy to get the board on board due to amount of money saving.

Q: Spent a lot of time figuring out what need to do to be successful and what cost savings are. How measure ongoing success?
A: Saved a lot of FTEs, a lot more turnover (revenue) in countries. Used to take 6 weeks to update website, and can now do in seconds.

Q: If had one piece of advice to all info professionals in room:
A: Not easy - have so much advice. Jack O'Neill said try to give best perfect fit to each person to make each person happy. With whole product suite of IBM, can give people the best perfect fit to make people happy.

Malcolm Gladwell coming to stage.

Is only one who finds it ironic that is information analytics conference in a city built around casinos?

Take us back to something happened 80-90 years ago. Prize fight in Jersey City between two great heavyweights - billed as fight of the century, with $1M purse (huge for 1920). At time, was young man named David Sarnoff who worked for RCA - leading manufacturer of radio sets. They had a problem - no one was particularly interested in buying radios. Sarnoff says they should broadcast boxing event live. No one had done before - radio was just news, classical music in between. Management all told him that was crazy, but he's persistent. Finally the grey hairs at RCA say he can do it on his own time, no budget. "Steals" radio transmitter from army, parks next to arena. Finds a guy to come in and do announcing. Talks to salesmen to arrange for radios in bars, etc. for people to listen. Transmits first live broadcast of sporting event. And next day, people start lining up to buy radio. Was tipping point that radio went from fascinating tech no one was interested in to runaway success.

Sarnoff on his own - own initiative, brings on technological transformation of his business. Everyone in this room is in same position. Have set of tools, capabilities that can transform your business.

What are some lessons from Sarnoff on how he pulled off transformation that might be relevant for you.

1. Time. When Sarnoff goes to bosses, one of reasons they are so skeptical is that they think it's trivial... can't think of how something like this can bring upon transformation. Think radio is so important tech that nothing can be done overnight. When look at institutions, socities, grappling with transformation - tha tintuition is false. Radical change happens far more quickly than could imagine. Crime rate in NY dropped by 2/3 in 3 years. No one thought it could be done without spending billions and billions of dollars (and moving half the population of the city somewhere else). Transformation doesn't have to take years and years.

2. Reframing. What was boxing match so instrumental? It reframed how americans thought about radio. Up to then, if asked americans what a radio was, would have said it was a big box where someone reads you the news. At the time, everyone was inundated with news. Kids on every streetcorner, 6 papers in a city (morning, mid-morning, afternoon, evening...). Would you spend 2 months' salary on a box to read you the news? But Sarnoff came along and said radio will bring the world live into your living room. Attend most anticipated sporting event of the year without leaving your house. Lightbulb went off in consumers' heads. If look at successful transformation, always begins with reframing.

Seat belt use - 20% to 75% in 3 years in 1980s. Happened because of act of reframing. Had been campaigns, laws, public service announcements for years. Nothing worked. People framed those efforts as gov't telling me what to do, and americas hate gov't telling us what to do with life. Finally seatbelt advocates stopped talking about adults and gov't and asked for laws that said children under the age of 5 should be restrained. No one could argue with that... and people were much more susceptible to Johnny in back seat saying "I'm wearing a seatbelt, why aren't you?" than gov't telling people what to do.

Another example - ipod. Not first mp3 player, but reframed it. People couldn't program VCRs, and were expected to understand this new mp3 gadget? iPod came out in 2 colors, one button, changed how people viewed what this device was.

How can you frame your problems for your organization to get your management to improve? Are bringing about democritization of intelligence. Bringing analytical tools to every layer of organization. Making entire organizations marter, not making it more complex. Are democratizing incredible amount of intelligence. When framed that way, can be irresistable.

3. Mavens - Social power. Who is David Sarnoff who brings about incredible transformation? Did he hold senior position at RCA? He was a kid. Did he have political power? Did he have a lot of resources? Did he have a huge budget? No. What did he have? He was the kind of guy who knew someone who knew someone who could steal a radio transmitter in Jersey City, who could find an announcer, who could convince salesmen to go out and put radios in bars and union halls. He had social power.

Social power is most undervalued. Able to win respect of peers through specialized skill or knowledge. In Tipping Point talk about notion of mavens. Power lies in hands of specialized few with access to information. A lot of understanding of mavens started in supermarket world. Were studying why supermarket specials worked. We don't know the prices of things worked (how much is the big box of cornflakes?), so why should it matter that it's discounted. We don't shop the discount, we shop the sign. So why don't supermarkets raise the price and then pretend to discount it? Because the reality is that only 99.9% don't know the price of corn flakes... that 0.1% does know, and they will tell all their friends.

The same way that when needed to buy new laptop, called his brother who worked in IT. Called someone he had a relationship with and trusted, not someone with power. And until understand those kind of relationship, won't be able to push transformation in organization.

Close with another story - one from WWII. At beginning of war, was something called east coast Pearl Harbor. For first 9-10 months after enter war, was catastrophe off east coast of US. Huge number of ships heading for England with supplies were sunk by u-boats, just a few miles offshore. Millions of tons of shipping lost. At first thought might be problem with leadership, but had very good leade.r Thought maybe weren't spending enough, but were spending a lot of money, one of best funded Navies. Thought maybe it was information, but had lot of intelligence. The problem was really one of informational analytics. Is simple way to stop sumbarines. Break codes, find one and track where it might be, capture one and interrogate. Pull together and create probalistic model on where think u-boats might be, instruct ship captains on where to go and how to avoid if encounter. Realized were doing all of the piece parts, but no one was pulling it all together, and no one was communciating it out to the captains. Created unit - 10th fleet - and they became mavens of that process. Analyzed all information, picked up phone and let captains know what was happening. Within weeks, battle in Atlantic changes, and goes from being at mercy of u-boats to commanding the seas for rest of war.

Transformation didn't take years. happened instantly. Happened because framed properly - wasn't about leadership, resources, or information, was about bringing intelligence together. And by social power, with mavens that could communicate effectively today.

Is same thing you can do for your organizations. {Malcolm Gladwell leaves stage}

Recognizing IBM Information Champions. Showing names on screen Grow and nurture communities, and recognize them for being the mavens of IBM Information Management.

Recognizing winner of IBM customer innovation awards.

Martin's Point
Qualcomm
Faurecia
Moody's
LG
University of Ontario Institute of Technology

It's up to us to be that maven. Sign up for user groups, participate in blogs, ask your account exec for an Information Agenda workshop. We have power to lead the way to transform organization through information.

General Session over.

Live blogging: New Intelligence: Making Better Decisions

Adam Gartenberg — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:48:34 -0700

Live blogging: New Intelligence: Making Better Decisions session

I'm in Eric Sall's New Intelligence session, which will focus on how companies are using information and analytics to make better decisions and actions. (This is a session close to heart for me, because it's pretty much been my day job for the last 9 months :)

He is starting with a few scenarios...

Imagine if you could track disease outbreaks across country borders in real time. An area have learned a lot about lately. Scary, but also fascinating to see how quickly disease can spread around world and how important to get quick information about it. What are symptoms, who's being effected, what steps can be taken. There is an international health agency that is looking to set up near real-time access to local and international disease data to be able to better forecast health risks. Hospitals and countries have more time to prepare for potentially disastrous disease outbreaks, while still complying with national privacy and security requirements.

Another example - imagine if you can catch money laundering before it happens. There's a major bank in Korea that is identifying patterns or linkages across accounts, products or channels so they can better predict illegal activity. They are running over 100 scenario-based algorithms employing 300 variables.

What would the implications be if you could apply social relationships of customers to prevent churn? Especially in markets where the switching costs are low, preventing churn is very important. The service and provider used by a person's friends and family plays a very influential role in determining which provider they will use. By looking at trends in calling patterns of their subscribers, a major telco provider is able to decrease churn and come up with products better targeted for certain demographics.

And one more example - imagine if you could identify at-risk students before they drop out of school. The Mobile County (Alabama) Public School System is looking at early indicators of when a student begins to have problems, with the goal being proactive intervention when students cross at-risk thresholds and get them the help needed to try to keep them in school.

All four examples have in common that all are leveraging information that's already there. It's not about collecting new info, but using info already have and thinking about what could be telling you and helping make decisions you make every day.

Explosion in information - in volume, variety, and compounded by velocity of decision making. While info should be helping that, the reality is that organizations are operating with blind spots. 1 in 3 managers say the frequently make critical decisions without the information they need; 1 in 2 don't have access to the information across the organization needed to do their jobs, and 3 in 4 say predictive information would drive better decisions.

As was discussed in keynotes, need to move beyond sense and respond to be able to predict and act; need to be able to make real-time, fact-driven decisions, rather than relying on uninformed instinct and intuition. Need to move analytics out of the back office and the hands of a few skilled experts to everyone and at every point of impact throughout the organization.

IBM's CIO study talked to 2,500 CIOs around the world, and Business Intelligence and Analytics came out as the top priority, with 83% citing it as a priority in gaining competitive advantage.

A shift is happening from business automation, which has been the major focus over the last 2-3 decades, to business optimization, and new investments are going into business optimization two times faster than into business automation.

When we talk about business optimization, there are several factors that we usually think about. We're seeing enterprises that are looking to:

Gain insight from the information explosion: Smarter integrated solutions help you manage, protect, process and analyze unprecedented volumes of structured and unstructured data - creating insight that drives innovation and business optimization.
Engage the entire value chain: Visibility into every part of the value chain creates an ecosystem that enables an organization to capture and share collective wisdom, collaborate and make decisions with greater confidence.
Move from reaction to prediction: Apply advanced analytics and industry expertise at all levels of the organization in order to more precisely predict - and continuously act on - risks and opportunities.
Create value faster: Operate with speed by delivering trusted insight that gives decision-makers – especially those at the point of customer contact - the confidence to take action faster, driving innovation and optimizing business results.

All the companies that are doing these aspects today are really on a journey along an information-led transformation. They're improving decision making across the company. Often decision making is thinking of as a senior executive thing - the big strategic bets. But really, decisions and actions are made and taken throughout the organization. Can see acceleration in the business optimization benefits get by taking a few steps.

The three entry points for information-led transformation are to:

Plan an information agenda - what is strategy, roadmap, governance plan to support business needs.
Apply business analytics to optimize decisions - taking predictive analytics techniques, BI techniques to optimize decisions and actions
Establish a flexible information platform - underlying platform and information management technologies to support it

Can start anywhere, depending on your particular situation, but to see full benefits need to make sure are encompassing all three.

When look across the IBM solutions that can help you get started with your information-led transformation, you can think of solutions across four areas:

Ensure cost effective information availability, security, retention and compliance for all types of workloads - Workload Optimized Systems and Services
Create a single, trusted view of information across the organization managed over a strategic period - Trusted Information Platform (e.g., information integration and MDM, ECM, Data Warehousing & Data Mgmt)
Optimize processes, manage business performance, and anticipate opportunities and threats - Business Analytic & Optimization Platform. (e.g., Perf Mgmt and Analysis, Predictive Analytics, Process Optimization)
Analyze and use information at the point of industry-specific business impact - Business Analytics & Optimization Solutions (e.g., industry-specific and cross-industry solutions)

IBM has been investing to accelerate our clients' information-led transformation. We've invested over $12B in software investments since 2005, has over 4,000 dedicated consultants, offers analytics in a box to accelerate time to value, and has the largest math department in private industry.

One final thought. A lot of what talking about is leveraging data already have. Challenge you to think about what data you have in org. that could use for predictive value but not using it today. In the "farm to fork" example, talked about using RFID for food safety. But once have data, are able to start doing things like smart replenishment, to move product more effectively and reduce distribution costs. And then can get to point where think about lineage as a competitive differentiator. They're now printing lineage on the label, so you can tell where it's come from, where it's going to. For something that is largely a commodity business, with very thin margins. This is a way of differentiating product, getting more value.

Visit the new intelligence website for a lot more information: ibm.com/new-intelligence

Live Blogging IOD2009 Day 2 General Session

Adam Gartenberg — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:27:40 -0700

The Day 2 opening session is getting started.

Mary Garrett - Chief Marketing Officer, IBM Sales and Distribution is hosting today.

In Singapore, 1500 cameras monitor the traffic. Tow trucks arrive at accidents within 15 minutes, and you can predict when the bus will show up to within 1 minute. Singapore has smart transportation. Copenhagen has Smart Utility Network that reduces power outages to 5 minutes. In London, 45M gallons of water a day are lost to leakage. They were able to reduce it by 20% by putting smart meters in people's homes.

Steve Mills coming to the stage.

This morning want to make connection with you on idea of information-led transformation and smarter planet. As 36 year veteran of IT industry and lived through many eras of computers. Like expression "information-led transformation" Have seen flow as move from era of highly centralized computing, personal computers, client/server, world-wide web. This decade's incredible growth and expansion around business process integration and process-led transformation. On cusp of another change, and that will be information-led. Doesn't deny what done before, but points to where can increased value.

Smarter planet - taking advantage of art of possible about what info technology makes possible today. Economies coming down to where can take advantage of all this technology, embed it, make it all more intelligent. The time is right. Idea of smarter planet - felt it would resonate with people that there is something we can do to fundamentally change and improve the world we live in.

Information is at core of what talking about. New Intelligence - how apply it to make world greener, working smarter.

A smart planet is one that is instrumented, interconnected and intelligent.

What does it mean to be smarter?

Begins with ideas of instrumentation - sensors and metering. If want control of something, must have visibility. Otherwise can't tell what's going right and what's going wrong, and price points are coming down to point where affordable. And maintenance benefits often will more than pay off investment - examples will give all have payoff in less than 6 months payback in preventive maintenance savings alone, before system was actually optimized.

Data integration, filter out the noise.

Comparison of historical data, with newly collected data. Data modeling and analytics - to find clusters of data, derive insight from it. Then get to and present to people that need to take action on it. Of course, feedback loop as go back with it.

Examples:
AIrbus - big aircraft manufacturer. Have massive problem with literally millions of parts that go into aircraft that have, different suppliers. Very assembly driven, with thousands of sub-suppliers and assemblers. Huge cost tied up in process and inventory. If missing critical part, whole process that relies on just in time delivery breaks down.

Full RFID sensing environment where all material is tagged through subassembly supplier processes, moved to right locations, staged into manufacturing plant, and utilized to make sure have just in time parts availability to build planes they need to build. Ties into ERP systems. Terabytes and Terabytes of data, and gives insight into efficiency of supply chain so can systematically over time bring down cost of building airplanes.

Another example - water management. Availability of clean water supplies.

Galway Bay, Ireland has a project under way to monitor through sensors and cameras the health of the bay, condition of fresh-water runoff into the bay, and making sure the clean water requirements are being complied to. Understanding wave action so can tap into ocean wave activity for energy generation in the future.

Another example - food processing and delivery. HRAFN is major food processor - meat processing business, from farm to table. Concerned about freshness and consistency of product delivering, with of course implications on health. Literally attacking on ranch, with RFID tagging of animals, right out through processding and out to the retailer. Significant RFID project, huge amounts of data, lot of analytics behind it. Great success story, and fascinating as think about RFID - beyond what see at a place at Airbus. Literally tagging livestock.

Announcing that HRAFN is the recipient of the 2009 Outstanding Smarter Planet Solution award.

Building smarter cities.

Smarter Government - Alameda County SOcial Services Agency. Have one of most forward-looking set of services - family welfare, child welfare services. Pulling together county data from six disparate state and county systems integrated into a data warehouse. The end result is real-time info for health care workers, and ability to reduced time spent by investigators for one case from 5 months to one minute. Also award winner for Outstanding Smarter Planet Solution.

Smarter Transportation. Are smarter transportation projects taking place around the world. Reducing the amount of carbon emissions, increased use of public transportation.

Smarter Public Safety - New York Police Department - 150 data bases, petabytes of data analyzed and mined to prevent crimes.

Geisinger Health System - Self-contained health system in Pennsylvania. What are treatments, outcomes, all organized and made consistent so physicians can look at your personal data as well as outcome data for people with similar symptoms or conditions or medical history.

Hamilton County Dept of Education in Chattanooga, TN - Using SPSS data mining software to take a deeper look at studen tpefrmance by combining data sources and exploring variables beyond what state reports provided. Able to identify warning signs of low performance and proactively intervene, seeing a 11.5% reduction in high school dropouts.

DONG Energy in Denmark - Lesson outage times by 25-50% and seeing up to 90% capital savings.

Information will be the transforming technology for years to come. Infinitely flexible, and can make world's systems as efficient as back office systems and processes have been automating up to now.

Customer panel moderated by Mary Garett: George - Cardinal Health, Svien Sagatun - StatoilHydro, Dr. David Acheson - Leavitt Partners (formerly head of FDA Food Safety division)

Q: Share with us the things you've seen and how information is used in food area
A: When think about food safety and sustainability, need to recognize this is one of most complex systems need to dela with. Domestic food supply in US. 150,000 manufacturers of food - excluding farms, retailers, restaurants. Now importing 15% of food consume in the US; Agriculture - 80%, produce - 40-50%. 200,000 foreign distributors and manufacturers (again, excluding farms). Such a dramatically enormous system designed to put food on the table 3 times a day, and we expect it to be 100% safe. Knowing that supply chain from farm to fork.

Q: Any experience in how secure that supply chain?
A: Yes, important - need to be safe from natural and unnatural events.
A: Cardinal health - look at how secure supply chain of pharmaceuticals - make sure don't have counterfeit drugs, allow to do analytics to make sure.
A: StatoilHydro - Better to predict and act than see and respond. Is how want to act - use investments to avoid accidents all together, rather than analyze why they happen.

Q: How ensure safety in pharmaceuticals
A: Criminals are getting smarter, so have loss to theft, and how track so when something is stolen, can work with authorities to track criminals stealing those products.

Q: How take info and apply it, when look at applying business analytics
A: Statoil - Industry is risk based industry. If drill exploration well, might cost to $100-250 million, and frequently end up with dry well. On other side, tremendous opportunities to optimize recovery and production with just percent or fraction of percent if can predict and analyze better.
A: Cardinal - How apply business analytics to commitment to customers. Supply pharma at high levels of service. Need to make sure have inventory of product at right time. Want better analytics so can look at inventory position and ensure have product in supply chain where need.

Q: A lot of opportunity to apply analytics in food area.
A: One of things that keep big food processors awake at night is how safe and secure things are in their supply chain. At other end, might be small farmer or producer - in US or outside - where records (if kept) are on pieces of paper in a shoebox. Might not even have computer connectivity. Examples for context - 1. Peanut butter outbreak had in the US that sickened 700 people and killed 9. All linked back to small peanut butter manufacturer in Georgia. This was a small manufacturer, but was distributing throughout the US. Going to over 400 different retailers and manufacturers that were turning it into other products. Because of that, and the lack of connectivity down system, when this problem began in January, there were many people down supply chain that didn't even know they had products from that supplier. Recall ran through June, with many people continuing to get sick. It's a data flow. Problems could have been prevented with preventive controls.

2006 - big spinach outbreak in the US, and spinach consumption still not back to where it was. This occurred on small ranch in California, and went all over US. Again - if could have preventive controls on supply chain, would have very different outcome.

All about prevention - having data and analytics to prevent it from happening, and shut it down as quickly as can when it does. Technology comes in with having really extensible traceability system. Steve gave a great example of that in Norway. The technical requirements are clearly doable - they've shown that.

Cardinal Health - Just starting our journey on starting up infrastructure laboratory on traceability.

Q: Talked about information and predictability. As talk about solutions all working on, Steve mentioned instrumented, interconnected, intelligent. How have you been looking at these solutions within your enterprises. Peoplea re at different stages of maturation.
A: Cardinal Health - How build out fabric of solutions. Had opportunity to make investments in traceability server, master data mgmt. Bring together to fabric of capabilities so can respond to any challenges that have. Have signficant investment in legacy systems - how pull out that large amount of data and apply analytics to it. Where next opportunities for us and how use to address business challenges.
Q: How long on this journey?
A: Goes back 2-3 years. See roadmpa going many years into the future.
Q: Are business leaders on journey with you?
A: Yes - always need to tie back to business case. Have exec leadership to make sure can make investments to produce most cost effective means for health care

Q: How about StatOil
A: Do a lot of work in remote locations. Can't bring extra personnel out to those locations, so need to bring the data to the people. Have invested heavily in instrumentation. Hundreds and hundreds of km of fiber optics from at-sea locations.
Q: Investments?
A: Investments are so big, that 0.1% savings could justify the investment
Q: How about at the FDA?
A: Dealing with spectacularly complex environment. Part of challenge is 350,000 foreign and domestic manufacturers. What doing at these facilities. Every one has to be registered with FDA. Part of data aspects is acquiring that registration information. Right now it's just who are you, what are you, and very generic description of what doing. Better than not knowing who's out there, but a lot of opportunity to improve on the situation. FDA has 3,000 inspectors for those 350,000 facilities. At the rate FDA was going, would take 1900 years to inspect all those facilities. How could data acquisition and analysis make that better? Could plug into what foreign gov'ts doing, where can trust that when they inspect those facilities, can upload that to the US FDA system. Another way would be to use 3rd party vendors and enter that data into the system. Can work to identify which suppliers are high risk vs. low risk, so when hit inspection point at 300 ports in US, can prioritize who to look at.
A: Cardinal - Similar problem in pharma. Had some challenges with FDA, and in working through that, now have project under way with IBM Watson Research to create tracking and data to enable reporting on suspicious activity.

Q: Talked a lot about success that had and how using data, going from information to predictability and traceability. If could sum up
A: Cardinal - Vision and Focus. Vision - appreciating IBM's vision in where investments being made today and infrastructure capabilities growing into solutions. And making sure that that investment is tied into Cardinal's goals. Focus - Getting technology leadership wtihin organization having high energy and commitment for extending capabilities,k and taking opportunity and driving through team with high energy
A: Statoil - Continuous Improvement - That's focus. Data avaialbility, benchmarking, ability to predict outcome and investment decisions
A: Leavitt - Prevention, Risk, React. The goal of anyone in food industry is to prevent things from going wrong in first place. To do that need to understand risk, which end of supply chain is the problem in, is it inside/outside the company. And need to react when things do happen.

Joining on stage - Bill Pulleyblank, VP Advanced Integration, GBS Business Analytics and Optimization

Do you remember the first time heard word H1N1? One of least favorite 4-letter words. Health care shows biggest challenges and opportunities on smarter planet.

Project did with University of Ontario Institute of Technology shows impact. [video - I'll look to find a copy and link to it later.] Are up to 16 streams of info all being watched by nursing staff, clinicians, residents, all on own timeframes and with different observations. Saw opportunity to capture data and analyze it. Addressing the challenge in neonatology is through ingegrated environment of InfoSphere Streams, DB2, and SolidDB. Can analyze data in real time and take earlier proactive response. The end result is being able to dect neonatal infection up to 24 hours earlier.

How deal with streaming data as opposed to static data. What if need to respond in real time as data passes. Can plug in different analytics at different points, pulling in different parts of the stream.

Diagnostics - Geisinger collecting clinical data, making it available so Dr. in office can find data and do better job diagnosing disease. But there's another source of data swamping physicians - published data. Constant flow of new treatments, new symptoms, coming from around the world. A system called "Watson" - what if could take all this info being published, collect, assimilate, figure out what's in it, so when physician thinks about possible cause of disease, can incorporate all that information to that. So articles that matter most are brought to doctor's attention, rather than requiring that they have come across it and recall it. Reduces cost, because if know what problem is, don't have to run unecessary tests to try to diagnose it.

Computational medicine - can you model the human heart - and not just any heart, but your heart, down to molecular level, so when considering treament, are talking specirically about what you need. The challenge of modelling something as complex as heart is a huge computational requirement, but when can do that, can truly personalize medicine.

Getting ahead of influenza. Constantly mutating. Would it be possible to predict which mutations will come up in the following season? Data analysis done on mutations, and were able to predict which mutations would come next. Gives head start on treatment and creation of vaccine.

DNA Transistor - Disease is very specific, so if you could take your DNA and discover your genome, would open new possibilities in treatment. Problem is that costs a lot of money to sequence genome. Dream is to be able to sequence an individual's genome for under $1000. IBM research is undertaking this today. (NY Times article on it. While there are detractors who say it's not possible, we're confident that can.)

Can a computer win at Jeopardy? Designing computer system to participate as a contestant on Jeopardy. With each iteration of the software are getting closer and closer to where can take on Jeopardy champions.

Summing up - Information Analytics - take best of science and best of business and see how can bring this to individuals.

Mary Garrett back on stage. Change is happening. Can choose to lead.

Tomorrow morning - focus on levers of change, another customer story, and special guest Malcolm Gladwell.

That's it for the Day 2 opening session.

IOD Blog Roundup (so far)

Adam Gartenberg — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:47:44 -0700

Eight years of conditioning by my kids has me up early here on Pacific Time, so I thought I'd use it productively and finally get the chance to see what others have been writing about the IOD conference so far. Here are some of the highlights of what I've found (and as always, my apologies for anyone I might have missed - drop me a line and I'll add you in).

Julian Stuhler
Julian’s IOD Blog Part 1
IOD 2009 Day 2 Gold Briefing Blog - DB2 pureScale (My favorite line: "... and I’m not the only one to see the irony of suffering from information overload at a data management conference!")

Vincent McBurney
Enemies of IBM Infiltrate the IBM IOD Conference
At IOD 2009 IBM Goes Bonkers for Analytics
Cognos Opens up its Reports to Mashups

Richard Hackathorn
IBM IOD/Gold Briefing - 4th Day PM
IBM IOD/Gold Briefing - 4th Day AM
IBM IOD/Gold Briefing - 3rd Day PM
IBM IOD/Gold Briefing - 3rd Day AM
IBM IOD/Gold Briefing - 2nd Day PM
IBM IOD/Gold Briefing - 2nd Day AM
IBM IOD/Gold Briefing - 1st Day

Todd Watson
Mashing Pumpkins: New IBM Cognos Mashup Tool
Turbo Video Dispatch #3: Todd and Scott Deconstruct 1 Trillion Connected Things (Including Cows)
IOD Press Conference: A Trillion Networked Things (Including Cows)
IOD 2009 Opening Session Debrief: Information-Led Transformations…by Winston the Turtle?
The IM Software Future’s So Bright

Craig Mullins
IBM IOD2009 Day One
IBM All Abuzz About Analytics at IOD2009

Chris Eaton
IOD 2009 Day 1 is Packed Full for Me

Robert Catterall
IBM IOD 2009 - Day 1

Andrew White
IBM’s IOD – Some Highlights for Me

Frank Fillmore
IOD is Here!
Balanced Configuration Unit (BCU)/Balanced Warehouse Morphs

FreeDB2
Spreading the word about DB2 on the Cloud

Mike Fergusun
Information Led Transformation - Will IBM's New Strategy Be A Success?

Conor O'Mahony
DB2 pureXML at the IOD Conference

Jacques Roy
IOD 2009: Sunday

Rafael Cross
Optim at IOD 2009

Breaking: new version of IBM Mashup Center and new IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service

Adam Gartenberg — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:22:44 -0700

I'm in the "nachos and news" program being put on for those of us participating in the inaugural IOD blogging program, and Anant Jhingran, CTO of Information Management, just shared exclusive news on the new version of IBM Mashup Center and unveiled the new IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service. The press release won't cross the wire until tomorrow morning (I'll link back to it when it does) but you can find the details below and on a few of the other blogs, like Todd "Turbo" Watson, Vincent McBurney, and ReadWriteWeb (Check back in for additional links).

I've written about mashups before. For those of you that might not have prior exposure to them, Anant described them as enabling the last mile of getting data to users by enabling end user to mix and match information themselves.

There are three key pieces to what's new with v2.0 of IBM Mashup Center:
1. Mashups only as good as data that have access to. Tremendously expanding data sources can natively connect to.
2. Only as good as interaction paradigm - expanding interaction and ability to create widgets.
3. Customers are saying this is great, but I own data, and will I let some random LOB guy come in and access my data? Am I really going to open it up? So adding controls.

The new IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Services exposes Cognos content so that it can be surfaced in mashups (IBM's or others) or other places/processes (while still ensuring that the appropriate controls on access, masking data, blocking IPs, etc. are in place.)

The result is to greatly extend the reach of Cognos. One of the key themes of the conference is on the importance of deliver information and insight to the point of impact, and combining Cognos reports with mashups allows for the information to be presented in the format most relevant to end user who needs to access that data.

Anant stressed that this was not just vision - mashups are actually being deployed by many of the clients. (I'll have details on one such client below.)

Jennifer Hanniman gave a demo of how use BI content in mashup to address business situation. For example, a sales team is being asked to increase their sales goals for the third quarter by 10%. They can look and see that sales were growing in Q1 and that there's a better picture in Q2. But if they're going to sign up for that increase, they'll want to look at more than just past trends. They need to understand where opportunities will come from and who will meet it. They also need to drill into the specific sales reps in Seattle branch, for example, and can look at opportunities from CRM system, but all the necessary information is not in one place. They also need to see what conditions are like - market data - for the accounts whose sales they might want to accelerate (e.g., if they just announced a bad quarter, the chances of getting a quick sale might be a lot lower).

By creating a mashup, they can bring in a Cognos report on BI, showing plan vs. actual sales data, broken down sales rep. Clicking on a sales rep name shows the plan target and how they are doing against that target. It can also show the top accounts for the selected rep, and bring up Google search information for each of those companies. The result is that they have the information they need to see whether it makes sense to plan on closing that account earlier in the year.

There are many companies using IBM Mashups today, and the press release highlights the stories of Kent County, UK, Wells Fargo, and AMEC Paragon. I'll write more about those tomorrow; we were joined at the session by Anton Langeler from O'Neill, the groundbreaking maker of wetsuits and much more, and he told a very passionate and compelling story about the value mashups are bringing to the company.

The company that literally started out of a surf shack has now grown to 225 product groups, with many distributors and 60,000 retailers, It's important that O'Neill have a view into the complete supply chain, not only to get data out of supply chain but also to share data back out to distributors and retailers.

They started with Cognos, and built data warehouse, and reporting above it. They are now using mashups to frame how they collaborate with retailers. They built a web interface - a widget - in which they can start a return process with a licensee. The result is they can read data on what was sold by the distributor, using data across the complete supply chain, in addition to using it locally within the company.

The advantage of doing this as a mashup instead of traditional programming is that they need 25 diff. places from which to get the data, and it's hard to get data from all those places, bring together, add some inforamtion. Now, with XML, can also update all the systems behind it. In the past, could build application, but were ending up with hundreds of different local applications. Instead, now have just one source where make changes, and distribute them out through the mashups..

Anton explained how strong the widgets are. For example, the stores have a lot of sales data, and they wanted to be able to combine it with weather data, as weather can have a big impact on understanding their sales. Now, read weather data, combined with retail sales, and bring everything together on the surface. Traditionally, would have had to bring all the data into the warehouse to do the reporting, blowing up the amount of data in the warehouse. Now they can can just combine it and materialize it on the fly as needed (with the added benefit of allowing them to be much more spontaneous.)

As another example, Anton cited many processes that involved downloading data from the warehouse, transferring it to Excel, making manual annotations on printouts, and passing the paper around. It used to take weeks to identify returns, for example, a process that's now done online and pretty much in real time.

One more benefit O'Neill has found is the savings of over 2 million Euro in modifications that otherwise would have been needed in their underlying data sources. Because reports can be assembled via mashups, there is a lot less customization needed to the underlying data sources, making upgrades "10 times easier," and also providing a lot more knowledge about the environment to the BI team.

The current version of the IBM Mashup Center is available for demos in the Lotus Greenhouse.

Press releases from IOD2009 Conference - Part I

Adam Gartenberg — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:42:19 -0700

The first of the press releases from the IOD 2009 conference have started coming across the wire. Just some quick links for now - more later.

IBM Helps Organizations Accelerate Innovation With Business Analytics

At its annual Information on Demand Global Conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a broad expansion of its business analytics portfolio with new capabilities that enable clients to drive business analytics and optimization using trusted information for faster, more accurate and smarter business decisions.
...
To help clients use business analytics, IBM is aggressively expanding its multi-billion dollar investment in this area. The offerings include:

New analytics software for sales, talent management and procurement. These pre-configured applications help organizations improve business performance by providing ready-made reporting and analysis capabilities so they can gain faster insight from information more cost effectively than if they were to build it themselves.
New Content Analytics software that will help employees more easily access and analyze structured and unstructured data, such as email and blogs, to drive smarter decisions based on external and internal insights.
Enhanced stream computing technology that enables organizations to make sense of structured and unstructured information stored in data warehouses and process it in real time.
New Master Information Hub software that makes it easy for clients to go beyond the pre-configured data categories offered by traditional master data management products.

Today, IBM also announced new offerings that support IBM's Smart Archive strategy that enables clients to effectively manage structured and unstructured information. Businesses can apply analytics to stored information, extracting key content as business needs arise, regardless of the storage location.

The full press release has a lot more detail on these announcements, and highlights of the impact the INformation Agenda approach is making for businesses. One example is Lufthansa Cargo, which "is one of the largest freight carriers in international aviation, handling over 1.76 million tons of cargo and mail each year across a network spanning more than 500 destinations worldwide. Part of Lufthansa's objective is to maintain a competitive edge in a highly contested market. With business analytics technology using IBM Cognos BI, Lufthansa is now able to carefully manage their global delivery chain, accurately monitoring transportation times, measuring quality of service, identifying and correcting trouble spots, and tracking overall performance trends. "

IBM Brings Business Analytics and Cloud Services to Smarter Archiving

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new offerings to provide organizations with analytics capabilities to make better use of their archived information and improve business processes. The new offerings support IBM's unified archiving strategy, called IBM Smart Archive, and are designed to help clients use content analytics and data discovery to determine which information is necessary to retain and archive, eliminating a major obstacle many clients have experienced in past archiving projects.

As a result of data growth, legal discovery requirements, regulatory compliance, and increasingly complex infrastructures, the need for information archiving is rapidly increasing. With these growing requirements for retention of information, organizations are struggling to determine what information they have, what to keep and what to discard.

The new offerings unify and simplify content, email and data collection and classification in a comprehensive approach, enabling multiple archiving models, including traditional on premise software, cloud services and hybrid options. With this offering, IBM is providing clients with the flexibility to choose between -- or combine -- delivery options to archive information that continues to grow within their organization.
...
France's National Railway Embraces a Smart Archiving Approach

Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais (SNCF) provides high speed train travel in Europe, serving approximately 63 million citizens including thousands of riders from neighboring European countries.

Handling approximately 700,000 ticket transactions per day, SNCF is using IBM technology to build a unified archive solution to manage and control its growing structured and unstructured content such as historical transactional ticket information, e-mail, invoices and other financial documents.

Prior to building the new archiving environment, SNCF had difficulty finding key pieces of information related to ticket transactions. The information was stored in multiple locations, impacting SNCF's customer satisfaction and the company's need to meet and regulate compliance requirements. With the new system, SNCF will now be able to better find and report on ticket transactions, enabling the company to quickly answer customer queries and general business requests.

See the full press release for much more detail on the specific Smart Archiving solutions being announced.

IBM Helps Alameda County Deliver Social Services

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that California's Alameda County Social Services Agency (Alameda County SSA) is using IBM analytics technology to improve the delivery of social services by implementing efficiencies at every program level. Furthermore it will help assure that the correct benefit amounts get to deserving clients.

The new analytics system enables caseworkers to quickly and securely verify claims and make critical decisions on services within minutes thereby improving the eligibility process for clients needing to access county services. Alameda County caseworkers and clients will now benefit from instant automated notifications during certain status changes, such as the benefits approval process allowing caseworkers to make more informed decisions.

The IBM analytics system, which was up and running in less than six months, gives caseworkers a consolidated picture of all the benefits a client is receiving across six different social services programs. Audit logs are used to improve accountability and ensure higher levels of privacy protection. The system can now deliver automated emails, text messages via cell phones, or calls to both caseworkers and clients notifying them when there are important changes in status, such as eligibility for Federal assistance.
...
Another key component of the Alameda County SSA system is that business analytics helps detect fraud and abuse and can potentially save millions. The ability to quickly identify people that are not entitled to benefits saves tax payer money. The new analytics system enables the agency to immediately detect problematic trends such as numerous claims from the same address.

For example, within the CalWorks (welfare) program alone, the agency identified millions of dollars of potential savings. Soon after launching the new software, Alameda SSA determined that only 10 percent of CalWorks' clients were participating in mandatory work activities. Previous systems erroneously reported participation at 50 percent. With the new system administrators are alerted of cases requiring action in less than a minute rather than weeks, months, or even more prolonged periods.

Rob Ashe Keynote: Analytics and Performance Management

Adam Gartenberg — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:35:56 -0700

Live blogging the Analytics and Performance Management keynote. Apologies for any typos and loose thoughts for now - I"ll look to come back and clean up in a bit.

Rob Ashe - Analytics and Performance Management - reflect the addition of SPSS to the portfolio.

The organizations that have a bettef forward view - a better view of the future - were the ones that outperformed their peers by 15 to 1.

Democratization of analytics - not just for analysts in the back room. It's going to mean content, ease of use, giving people info in context that are comfortable with - might be search, might be rows and columns.

Business Analytics, Business Intelligence is coming in as the #1 concern of CIOs. 83% said this was top initiative in organizations.

Entry points to an information-led transformation

Plan an information agenda
Apply business analytics to optimize decisions
Establish a flexible information platform

Looking in more detail at the business analytics

Advanced Analytics
IT/Busines Balance
Social Computing
Text and Unstructured
Cloud
Know How

We're delivering on all of these fronts.

Deepak Advani - SPSS
"We've got really cool technology"

This morning everyone kept talking about outcomes, don't want to be reactive, want to be predictive.

Customer - Bill Dibble, Senior Vice President from Infinity Insurance & Property Casualty Corporation
Signed contract July '07, went live January '08. 403% return saw in three months with SPSS product. As SVP claim operation, wanted to make data usable to underwriting and other areas. Wanted to own the data, use the data for other purposes.

One of first things was knowledge in helping develop rules sets. Not just analyzing fraud and subrogation, but getting claims into hands of proper specialist. Helps get it into the right hands. The quicker that could move claim that doesn't have fraudulent characteristics lets them be ahead of competition.

Goal - make predictive analytics pervasive - not just for business analysts. Make it customizable, flexible. The ability to insert predictive analytics is where we're headed. Web based and simple.

Richmond police reduced murder by 30% and rape cases by 20% in 12 months. Cablecom reduced churn from 19% to 2% by identifying experiences early on in the customer lifecycle that caused dissatisfaction. 53% of formerly dissatisfied customers become promoters for the company.

Demo of Cognos Content Analytics. Example where crawled and loaded into content analytics over 350,000 forms. Clickable graphical UI. Can use facets to modify what are looking at (e.g., device information, date added). Tabs that look at things like time series, deviations, trends. Can change scale or dive deeper into a particular column or filter results over time. Can sort by noun, verb phrases... So can see a correlation between the words "failure" and "battery" mentioned in a single form (as opposed to having those forms specifically identified with those errors), and zoom in on which brand, which manufacturer, and identify exactly where the potential problem might be

Demo - Go! Dashboard - Sales Analysis Dashboard

Web-based dashboard - filter, zoom in on data are looking for, updating multiple charts at once. Can easily change display type (stacked area chart instead of bar chart). Can look at performance by region on a map, and then drill into greater detail.

Key themes: Open and heterogeneous

Performance Management for use with SAP

No restrictions - embrace all data... use everywhere
No waiting - immediately enhance enterprise decision making
No limitations - Extend SAP data across the entire enterprise

Announced today - new analytics solutions

Demo - Sales Analytics. Can drill into findings and reports on item analysis, customer analysis, channel analysis. For example, can see that last stage of sales cycle this quarter is down over previous quarters, so may want to investigate that further. Another eport - sales segmentation. Can then drill further into a particular product or segment or channel to see where the problem really is.

Live blogging the IOD 2009 Opening Session

Adam Gartenberg — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:05:23 -0700

I'm sitting in the Mandalay Bay event center for the IOD2009 conference opening general session. I'll be doing my best to live blog from here, so keep hitting refresh for the latest this morning.

Opening band - "It's a good day to lead the way"

Terry Fator (winner of America's got talent) coming on stage. Good pun on information on demand ("I demand more information")

Ambuj Goyal, General Manager Business Analytics and Process Optimization takes the stage.

Given the current economic environment, we expected a decline in attendance, but attendance is actually higher than last year.

We believe we have created a journey which we call information on demand, which we are taking to the next step of information-led transformation. Built on fantastic solid foundation. 4 years ago were focused on data and content to run businesses. When we created vision called IOD, we said info is locked in these environments. How can we free it up to unlock the business value of information. Created a term, and called it information on demand. Need to get arms around info so we can reduce cost associated with this environment, but also create trusted information. Govern that info before analyze. And then, set of capabilities around InfoSphere, FileNet, Optim, Cognos, SPSS, ILOG - captured these capabilities to create an information on demand software stack. $8B in SW investments over past 4 years, with another $4B in organic investments, fo r a total of $12B in software investments, over 15,000 new clients.

Thousands of you on this journey helped us create a proven approach on how to bring LOB and IT together. Call it Information Agenda. Strategy, Roadmaps, Infrastructure, Define and Govern. Helped you move from information projects to information-based enterprise. Consistently leverage information and see value.

Now taking to next step. 20 years ago - how manage enterprise resources to create new value. SW and SVC firms came together to create that value. The time has come for the information space. Information is a strategic asset, just like HR or cash or any other strategic asset. Needs to be goverened, managed just like those other other assets.

How leverage deep skills associated with analytics and optimization and open standard-based world class infrastructure, so can optimize call center, or sales operations and planning, or category management. Just like ERP 20 years ago, this will be bigger than that.

Please welcome colleague who runs GBS for IBM company - SVP Frank Kern.

Role is to introduce you to our clients and their point of view. Want to talk about how clients are transforming organizations and achieving significant business outcomes.

A lot of what we're going to talk about is what it takes to create predictive capability for business decision makers. To be able to answer question "what if."

In today's environment, *some* certainty is just not good enough. We're making significant investments in services. Just 7 months ago announced business analytics and optimization service line. 4000 consunlants, and first time announced new service line since PWC acquisition.

What's happening in world today? Operating in fundamentally different ways. Flatter, smaller, interconnected, riskier world. Pile on top of it historic explosion in information. Not just convergence of physical and digital world. It's about supply chains and weather patterns, rivers and railroads, so that everyone and everything is leaving real-time data tracks. Technology and instrumentation are abundantly available, but to turn this flood of info into intelligent action requires incredible power of analysis. All this comes together in situation where businesses fear they are operating with blind spots, at a time where margins for error reduced to zero.

This will separate the winners from the losers.

The client's dilema - Processing more info than ever before - but less of what is available - and radically less of what is generated in real time is available. Clients sense huge opportunity if they can master all of this information.

Study conducted earlier this year - more than 1 in 3 business leaders are frequently making decisions based on information they don't trust or don't have; 1 in 2 business leaders say they don't have access to the information they need to do their job. Top performers are 15x more likely to predict and prepare for the future.

Clients are telling us they must be faster than ever before - reaction times are being squeezed out. They need not only be fast, but right, with decisions made on facts. They must have clear view of endpoint - consequences and outcomes of decisions ahead of time. Need to move beyond "sense and respond" - they tell us they must be able to predict and act - see threats/opportunities ahead of time to structure business and processes to meet that objec

With all this comes new opportunities.

One example - working with NYC Fire Dept. Integrating data from multiple sources. Monitor conditions in the more than 8000 buildings in New York. WOuld take 12 years to inspect all buildings in person. Fire Dept. asking what if.... what if mission isn't just to put out fires, but to prevent them. With up to date data, can predict which buildings most need inspections. One step closer to actually preventing fire from happening in first place.

Panel discussion:
Shirley Lady - VP Business Informatics, Blue Cross BlueShield Association
Nihad Aytaman - Director of Business Applications, Elie Tahari, Ltd.
Debbie Oshman - Director of Analytics and Business Insight, Chevron

Q: How important is information to your company
Lady - Busines leaders came together, pooled data into data warehouse with conformed data. In midst of health care reform, and will have to adjust business whatever outcome. Ability to take data and model possibilities will allow to respond appropriately and hopefully survive.
Have largest data warehouse in healthcare industry - 50M medical records, claim data, pharmacy data, entrollment. Flexibility to do benchmark statistics, compare across country disease rates, etc.

Q: How important to a SMB like Elie Taharai?
Aytaman - Very important. Info is there from transactional systems, and ability to extract that info in meaningful and timely manner and present to managers that makes the difference. After business intelligence went up, have own retail stores. Retail coordinators could change buying patterns based on info in transactional reports that couldn't see below. Timeliness and accuracy of what could pull together from disparate systems - pull together from 5 systems into data warehouse, and report out of that DW across enterprise. Eliminate info silos. Line managers can easily get access to information from systems outside of their deparatment.

Q: Massive staff to put together {laughing}?
Aytaman - A SMB can implement successful BI solution. Staff is huge - "my BI person and DW person is just one person." If we can do it, anyone can do it. Would suggest toe veryone in SMB to look into it and implement if they don't have one already a BI Solution

Q: How important is it to leaders in Chevron
Oshman - Do business in over 100 countries. Very different lines of business. Have siesmic data, financial data, reporting data. Changing way manage information. Learning to manage it as an asset. Manage offshore platforms, big manufacturing facilities, think through asset lifecycle in those assets, and starting to realize need to do same for information. Identify top value data elements in company, and make sure quality is where it needs to be so can make better decisions across company.

Q: Value of taking information and extending it out to value chain - consumers, other organizations
Lady - Moving forward in healthcare arena it will be important to inform providers. Have own systems, but need to look at how marry together to identify and share patterns, what's working and not. Comparative effectiveness is very important, and believe have built warehouse able to assist and come to agreement with providers on where should be spending the dollars.

Q: Business outcomes are critical. Are there breakthroughs you've achieved that are real business outcome breakthroughs?
Aytaman - Have achieved several advantages and cost savings through BI initiative. One is retail division being able to change buys. Puts right merchandise on floor for right customer in right region. Sell more merchandise and have lower returns. Were also able to change delivery commitments to customers and manufacturer deliveries. Combined together and made visible to logistics folks. Reduced from 85% error to 45% error; makes huge difference. Before BI went live, people print reports from diff. systems and put together manually on excel spreadsheets. Now just click and a few seconds away. Tremendous value

Q: On consumer side - how keep up with leading edge of fashion industry
Aytaman - Consantly watch what's going on out on selling floor and react to it. Retail sales info that get from customers that go into data warehouse and BI to calculate sell throughs. React to that on weekly basis. Very important to have access and be able to present to executives on timely basis.

Q: What about at Chevron?
Oshman: Optimizing fuel supply chain - no one wants to get to local gas station and have no gasoline for your car. Working to lower costs and optimize processes. (Will be giving talk on it tomorrow). Do business in over 100 countries, very complex - combined global supplier spending... used to have a look back - what spent last month, what contracts looked like. Now can look forward to when contracts coming up, where risk with that supplier, to find opportunities to make better business decisions based on that information.

Q: Largest data warehouse in healthcare - how take advantage of that?
Lady - 54 million members, millions and millions of claim data. Look for anomolies, claims, events. (Also have session tomorrow.) Put analytical data mart using Cognos tools to leverage data and make available via portal access to a plant to do own queries on the data. Just launched in June, so still in infancy, but already seeing good results. Gives plans flexibility to run own queries and benchmarking specific to their needs, which lets them be more responsive to their client. Also lets look at disease states, have sample size that are large enough to do analysis on; just about anywhere else can't get sufficient sample size.

Q: Real time?
Aytaman - Say we have near real-time. Every transaction that happens in disparate systems flows into data warehouse within 5 minutes or less. Eliminates nightly load windows, and info fresh throughout the day. If could suggest to anyone building warehouse, suggest doing it in near real time.

Q: How what doing now changing how company changing how company thinks about its information
A: Have always had breakthroughs in exploration space. Recently started thinking about info as an asset. Not just how to optimize process (although still key to future) or which systems replace, but which business decisions need to be made and then focus on quality of data. Expect it to help stay competitive in very dynamic world as head into future.

Frank Kern - Hear fascinating things being done, but also a journey, and of all great things being done, a lot more to be done into the future. This has been journey for companies around world, and a journey for IBM as well. IBM consulting working with IBM research with Hardware, and all is to maximize value of Business Analytics and Optimization for our clients. Couldn't be more excited about possibilities for the future.

Terry Fader is back. I'm impressed

Video - Bharti airtel. Dr. Jai Menon. Just crossed 100M customers, and well on way to 200M in next few years. Bharti Airtel is addressing 3 large challnges - diversity, reach, scale. Diverse customer segment - Now reaching into all towns of India, crossing 400,000 villages in India. Growth and speed.

Real-time analytics to optimize business. "Using information-led transformation to provide analytical information right at these touchpoints." Analytics plays important role for revenue assurance, planning, supply chain, ERP, etc.

Ambuj Goyal back on stage. Bharti is company that believes in owning information. Looking for business outcomes and optimizing end to end business processes.

Have heard in first part of session how focused on delivering better business outcomes. Now we are going to focus on information platforms. How core innovation must go on in information and analytics. As I focus on business outcomes and busines analytic aspects and bringing more of IBm capabilities in industry context, this innovation must continue on, and to help do that, please welcome new General Manager Information Management, Arvind Krishna.

Need strong base on innovation and strong base of technology. $12B invested in R&D and Acquisitions to deliver information, analytics, optimization platform to help people achieve outcomes are looking for. Also invested in Business Partners, Research labs, the largest mathematics department in private industry to fuel these innovations.

Platform needs to be comprehensive and integrated. Working with erector sets takes time away. Must capture all leading edge technologies allowing you to scale business without scaling costs with business. Will announce a # of exciting innovations in platform.

Must have solid foundation that captures data and content. DB2 pureScale - 100% utilization 24 hours per day. IMS11 - transactional database par none. Over 50k transactions per second, up to twice as fast as IMS 10. Smart Archive - for unstructured and structured information.

Step up from repositories on how integrate it. As heard earlier , need to integrate across multiple systems. Smart Analytics System - 3x faster BI, 50% less space. Manage it all as one thing, taking away time and risk and improving performance. Master Information Hub - 180M parties, 480M accounts, 61M transactions/day - structured and unstructured. Can bring in information and get single view of products and customers. Give it back in extensible domains so can look at it from perspective that matters for you. InfoSphere Streams - >5M messages per second, with milli-second speed.

Analytics - how combine structured and unstructured analytics. Cognos Content Analytics brings together capabilities from FileNet, from Cognos portfolio - expose what's happening in e-mail, documents, across multiple (11) languages, and look at same way as store sales, customer profitability. Look at all through one interface. Predictive, "what if" outcomes. SPSS adds that capability to our stack. Bring rich experience from over 250,000 customers to answer questions, not just do crystal ball gazing. Process optimization - ILOG brings many capabilities leveraging strong base in mathematics and analytics. How do scheduling, constrained programming. Cognos Analytic Applications capture not just technology talking about, but best practices and templates aimed at specific. When talk about customer profitability or customer planning - doing it every month or every week, not just annually. Allows you to save time and get up and running that much quicker.

All new innovations being announced here today. Delivered in way that are integrated, work together, and give you business outcomes we've been talking about.

These fuel innovation of information-led transformation. Have to do at lower costs because economy and all of our managers demand that. Must deliver value and business outcomes that desire.

Ambuj Goyal back on stage with Arvind Krishna. During conference will be recognizing 11 clients for customer innovation. Two today. Best information on demand solutions. Wanted to provide single view across city - disability, everything across health and human services, etc. First award goes to NYC Health and Human Services.
Second - Large furniture retailer using information from clients and stores. Leading edge retailer, optimize what put on floor, what kind of promotions to do. They're bringing all of this analytics in house to deliver value to business while also lowering own costs. Recognize with Outstanding Information Agenda award - Rooms to Go.

Recognizing multiple partners over the conference - two today. Best IOD Showcase. Solution does both sales and revenue prediction, and optimizes management processes end to end. Niteo Systems.

Second - CTO innovation award. Provide on numerical data, and geographical data. As combine analytics with GIS systems, recognize spotOn systems as way to leverage both of these analytics from one perspective.

Ambuj Goyal: If only look at just one piece of this, will have information projects, not an information-led transformation. If look at typical model, have core systems. Maybe sales analytics, workforce analytics, risk analytics... put on operational systems. But when want to use information to improve call center, will be yet another project. End up with huge amount of storage cost, huge amount of redundant information, and not truly on ILT. Just like ERP was a systematic journey 20 years ago. If you're doing separate projects, stop and think. Most succussful engagements where info was able to be reused and built on. It not only accelerates value, it is a much higher performance system than any other place. So think about creating an information platform, not just a data warehouse or a BI system.

Imagine if could discover insight not buy doing search and query, but by system telling you itself it's time for recall of insulin pump 8 months in advance of headlines appearing in the paper, saving lives. If could prevent 1 in 4 crimes before they happen or flag potential fruad 14 times faster. If could identify sepsis in premature newborns 24 hours earlier. These aren't just imagination - are organizations doing this today.

Terry Fator's back out to play us out - "What a wonderful world."

Want to follow IOD 2009 from afar? Here’s how!

Adam Gartenberg — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:13:05 -0700

For those of you who can't be here on site with us for the IOD conference this week, don't despair. There are still plenty of ways to follow along from home.

As I mentioned a while back, this is the first year that we're having a formal blogging program, so be sure to check in with folks like me and Todd "Turbo" Watson for regular updates. (I'll update this post with links to additional bloggers shortly - but I expect if you subscribe to or check in on planetdb2 and planetids you'll catch a lot of them). You're going to want to keep your eyes on the IBM press room as well, as I expect we'll have announcements rolling out over the course of the week.

You can also follow along on twitter through the official @IODGC2009 and the #IOD2009 twitter hashtag, as well as several others that will be tweeting from here. Some IDs grabbed from @IOD2009 include:
@agberg (that's me)
@turbotodd
@srhayes
@srielau
@Perficient
@AnnBeeson
@Xenos_Group
@JustinDerrick
@MarkJeffries1
@TheNakedChief
@craigmullins
@sfichten
@Perficient
@db2fred
@wfavero
@ranjun_chauhun
@mauricioswg
@rhetorica2
@srhayes
@etopolski
@craigmullins
@ffillmorejr

Again - far from a complete list, but some names to get you started (and feel free to mail/tweet me if you want to be added to the list)... keep your eyes on #IOD2009 for all the latest.

***Updated 10/26 8:15am pt with additional names***