Explaining how IBM is making the cities work better...

I was at home last night watching CNBC (could have been Bloomberg) with my 10 year old daughter when an IBM advertisement campaign came on and got her excited. Needless to say I was left with the task of explaining what IBM does today. What's the IBM company of 2013? What capability would encapsulate what "Building a Smarter Planet" signifies?

As I pondered through this, I settled on the view that the best way of approaching the issues is to focus on a challenge most of us experience / encounter on a daily basis. The need to leverage technology to sustain economic growth and enhance the quality of life of citizens in a rapidly changing world appeared to be a good choice.

From an offerings point of view, I narrowed my focus on IBM's Intelligent Operations Center portfolio. Our city leaders are being held to account, and need to improve their decision making. IT can help by enabling them to derive insights from the information and data they have at their disposal. In this instance, the volume of data needs to be sufficiently comprehensive and readily available for analysis. Additionally, where historical data is not available, IT can also be used to anticipate problems, so the right people can get in front of events and problems before they become a crisis. And all of these activities require coordination; coordination of people, resources, systems etc.
 
The need to empower city leaders, from mayors to the police chiefs, heads of transportation, and beyond is clear. The Intelligent Operations Center Portfolio of services enables users to

    1.    Leverage available information to make better decisions
    2.    Analyze problems and resolving them proactively
    3.    Coordinate resources and processes to operate effectively

The initial 3 areas of focus was the intelligent management of operations, whatever they might be, traffic and water management.

Intelligent Operations Management is about planning, organizing, monitoring and sharing information between various stakeholders. We are in an era where governments are being held to account, so the ability for public sector executives to access information on dashboards that include domain specific key performance indicators is critical. 

With respect to traffic management, the need for realtime visibility is a obvious. The ability to analyze historical data and correlate to traffic incidents can enhance future planning. Water is one of the world's most precious resources, and in many parts of the world needs to be managed carefully. IBM has invested in developing capabilities that enable utility companies to instrument, collect, analyze and visualize data on water usage using Geographical information systems. IBM is also innovating on the delivery of these capabilities to its clients, offering both the ability to deploy this on premise, in which case the PureApplication System would be a attractive platform, or as a Software as a Service offering on IBM's Smart Cloud.