IBM CIO Jeanette Horan: Employees who get analytics from the cloud don’t have to wait for IT to make data useful. Cloud is helping IBM sellers improve revenue performance and financial analysts to make better forecasts.
To gain necessary capabilities and expertise in mobile, social, cloud and analytics, organizations often need to partner for (out)sourcing.
(via IBM - The power of partnership: Has your outsourcing evolved? - United States)
IBM SmartCloud for Social Business Expands to European Data Center
With its new European Data Center, IBM will help meet each customer’s unique deployment needs through flexible delivery models, including either public or private cloud or a mix of cloud and on premises.
Once live, companies can tap into IBM’s integrated social experience that includes one-click access to tools such as online meetings, email, calendaring, instant messaging and more. To further empower customers, IBM lets businesses invite external partners, clients, suppliers and more to take part in these interactions, all while meeting legal and regulatory requirements for data privacy.
For example, to improve the speed of marketing and sales execution, employees can build collaborative networks in real time, both internally and externally. With one click, employees can tap into the power of presence awareness capabilities to see if colleagues are online to chat about the plan, review the document, and engage in collaborative and concurrent real-time editing. When questions require outside input, the team can quickly invite partners, suppliers, clients and others into the community to review project work as well as other related items.
60,000 pages of architectural drawings for Dallas-Fort Worth airport are put on cloud, saving over $1.2M in paper costs alone, as well as reducing contractor mistakes and making site planning more collaborative.
(via Huge construction firm uses iPads and Apple TV to save millions | CITEworld)
Mobility and healthcare innovation
Mobility is a big part of the solution for healthcare innovators:
- Sproxil, in partnership with IBM, detects counterfeit medications. Patients scratch off a sticker to reveal a code they text to Sproxil, for authentication.
- Daktari 1525, from Safaricomm, is a 24-hour call-in medical service in Kenya, where healthcare providers are extremely scarce.
- Proteus Digital Health has created tiny sensors swallowed with pills that relay information to your smartphone about how the drug is affecting your body.
- Dexcom brings consumer electronics design sensibility to devices for continuous glucose monitoring — including LCD display and customizable alerts.
- Logiq from GE Healthcare is an ultrasound device as portable as a laptop. It provides 3D scans of major league players moments after an injury.
- Walgreens mobile app lists local pharmacists by expertise, medication minders and more.
- Athenahealth puts medical records in the cloud and will soon be able to provide doctors access to patients’ records on the go.
- Teladoc provides medical consultations by phone and video. The goal is to reduce unnecessary office visits, and allow physicians to connect directly with patients.
Via Fast Company, The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Health Care | Most Innovative Companies 2013 ,
Cloud services are creating a distinct sense of overlap and a blur of corporate responsibility as CMOs evaluate, acquire, and field extensive new IT capabilities for digital advertising, customer experience management, CRM, and other related functions across a growing set of touchpoints, which now include at a bare minimum traditional media, online media, social media, and mobile devices. A decade ago, much of the service delivery for these functions would be delegated under the CIO, who would support the marketing department and other groups in their IT endeavors as needed (although largely on IT’s schedule.)
Banking on Cloud to target the individual
In community banking, technology has been the proverbial double-edged sword. One effective edge is the ability to sell valuable products and services tailored for the individual customer. The dangerous edge is the complex and expensive burden on the banks, many of which are ill-equipped to administer the IT necessary to support these necessary advancements.
But cloud technologies will enable the sword to be swung safely – to enable banks to return to the simplicity of the past, but also serve and thrive in the future.
— Howard Bruck, CIO, Hudson Valley Bank
How a social supply chain works, explained by business leaders from an innovative food retailer: at every point of the food ecosystem people collaborate by supplying data — growers, processors, retailers, and customers too. (IBM, Fairway Market Build Smarter Food Network )
JSB on social media, the cloud and the true purpose of business
John Seeley Brown (JSB) is a leading researcher, educator and writer on topics related to the organizational structures and technology that promote radical innovation. In today’s HBR article he explains that it’s much easier now for new ideas to come from “the edge,” or outside of the core business. In previous decades it was too expensive to set up the infrastructure to pursue radical business ideas. Today, cloud technology makes it very inexpensive to develop, prototype and pilot them. What’s more, social media can provide the personal relationships at the edge of organizations, that is outside of the core operations they currently depend on for profits and revenue.
I believe that social media will help create an ecosystem of edge organizations and their parent companies. To get a sense of what this might look like, think of IBM’s Jams platform for collaborative innovation. This evolution in the way companies innovate reflects a shift in nothing less than the purpose of the firm. The classical view is that the firm exists to minimize transaction costs. But John Hagel and I suspect that the firm has a new purpose — namely, to promote the development of talents and capabilities and thereby attract and retain the best in the ongoing wars for talent, and at the same time create an entrepreneurial culture that nurtures employees’ questing and connecting dispositions.
The purpose of a business is not narrowly economic, JSB maintains. Rather, it is to foster human creativity and connections. And technology is what makes those human connections possible. .
A new IBM study focused on Cloud and the telecom industry indicates a definite “Cloud-shift” ahead. While only 24 percent of the telecom respondents currently use cloud for sweeping innovation, more than half plan to rely on Cloud for business model innovation within the next three years. For example: gaming on TV and remote management of home appliances.
Via Is There a Cloud Hanging Over Your Business Model? - IBM Power in Data
