Live @ IBM InterConnect 2012: Deepak Advani On Big Data Analytics

Deepak Advani, vice president with IBM’s Business Analytics organization, owns strategy and development for products in the business intelligence and predictive analytics arenas.

Deepak Advani has had a rich and storied career, starting out with IBM before later becoming chief marketing officer for Lenovo, then returning to the IBM fold to focus on the massive information management opportunity.

In particular, on business analytics, and how the improved utilization of technology for analyzing big data can help companies drive desired business outcomes.

Deepak owns the strategy and development for IBM’s Business Analytics products and solutions group, and his portfolio includes products for business intelligence, predictive analytics, risk analytics, social media analytics and financial performance management.

At IBM InterConnect recently in Singapore, Deepak sat down for a chat and explained how organizations should go about tackling the business analytics opportunity. He also provided some insight into the PureSystems PureData announcement, as well as to how organizations can more effectively utilize social intelligence data.

IBM And MIT Sloan: Corporate Culture Key to Success with Analytics

IBM continues its business analytics drumbeat with some new research released today by MIT Sloan Management Review and the IBM Institute for Business Value which reports that organizational challenges, more so than technology hurdles, are holding companies back from fully integrating analytics across their enterprises.

The ability of organizations to create a competitive advantage with analytics has surged in the past 12 months, according to new research from IBM and MIT Sloan Management Review. This chart shows the percentage of respondents who cited a competitive advantage using analytics, year over year, grouped by analytic sophistication levels.

According to a global survey of more than 4,500 executives, managers and analysts from more than 120 countries and 30 industries, 44 percent of organizations say cultural barriers to enterprise-wide analytics adoption, such as the requirement for new leadership competencies and organizational resistance to new ideas, are the primary barriers.

In contrast, only 24 percent point to technology concerns.

The new report, entitled “Analytics: The Widening Divide,” builds on the findings from the original study by MIT SMR and IBM in 2010 to understand how companies are embedding analytics in more of the enterprise’s processes and operations.

The 2010 study found organizations fall into one of three levels of sophistication: basic users referred to as Aspirationals, followed by the more Experienced users, and the most advanced users referred to as Transformed.

Year-to-year comparisons reveal that the more sophisticated users are expanding their deployment of analytics and widening the performance gap over their peers.

For instance, from 2010 to 2011 the percentage of respondents who cited a competitive advantage using analytics grew 23 percent for Transformed and 66 percent for Experienced organizations.  These same organizations are more than twice as likely to substantially outperform their competitive peers.  

In contrast, Aspirational organizations lost ground in competitiveness, falling 5 percent since last year.

“Our new research shows that the early and aggressive adopters of analytics make significant gains in both performance and overall competitiveness,” said Fred Balboni, IBM’s global leader, Business Analytics and Optimization.  “These indicators point to an urgent need for organizations to foster a data-oriented culture and drive an analytics strategy that embeds fact-based insights into decisions and processes at every level of the business.”

“We’ve found that there are three legs to the competitive analytics stool: a data-oriented culture, information management competency, and analytics expertise,” said David Kiron, executive editor for MIT Sloan Management Review.  “Companies that have all three use analytics to deliver advantage in the marketplace.”

The study found that the majority of organizations are using analytics to manage their financial and operational activities, but are less likely to rely on analytics-based insights for decisions in other key areas.

On average, less than 25 percent of Aspirational organizations, and one-half of Transformed organizations, say they rely on data and analytics to make decisions involving customers, business strategy and human resources.

Even Transformed organizations are not using analytics to their fullest potential, indicating ample opportunities for advanced users to do more and for less sophisticated organizations to create a competitive advantage by targeting analytics at key strategic activities.

While Transformed organizations use analytics more broadly across the organization than their peers, they differentiate themselves by intensely focusing on applying analytics to three areas:

• Increasing the speed of decisions – Transformed organizations are more than three times more likely than Aspirationals to focus intensely on making better decisions, faster.
• Managing enterprise risks – Eighty-six percent of Transformed organizations are addressing the full range of organizational risks that can impact their business, while none of the Aspirational organizations have the same level of focus. Transformed organizations are using analytics to not only mitigate, but also anticipate risks.
• Engaging customers – Transformed organizations are outpacing their peers in leveraging the enormous amounts of data available today to understand and engage with their customers in new ways.  Two-thirds of them are putting analytical insights into the hands of customer-facing employees to drive sales and productivity — compared to one-fourth of Aspirationals.

The study examines how Transformed organizations are creating an advantage in the marketplace.  The analysis shows that of all the characteristics exhibited by this group, their proficiency in six areas (represented by the percentage of Transformed companies that say they possess these characteristics) distinguished them the most:

• Ability to analyze data – 78%
• Ability to capture and aggregate data – 77%
• Culture open to new ideas – 77%
• Analytics as a core part of business strategy and operations – 72%
• Embed predictive analytics into process – 66%
• Insights available to those who need them – 65%

To access the full report, visit MIT SMR or IBM.

Go here for more information on the MIT SMR/IBM joint New Intelligent Enterprise project.

Information On Demand 2011 Breaking News: IBM Accelerates Big Data Analytics

Today, here at Information On Demand 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada, IBM unveiled new software that brings the power of managing and analyzing big data to the workplace.

Whether in the office or on the road, employees can now gain actionable insight anytime, anywhere from the broadest range of data and put it to work in real-time.

IBM Senior VP Steve Mills explains the "why" of business analytics at today's press conference here at Information On Demand 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The new offerings span a wide variety of big data and business analytics technologies across multiple platforms from mobile devices to the data center to IBM’s SmartCloud.

Now employees from any department inside an organization can explore unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, log files, genomic data and video, and make sense of it on the fly as part of their everyday work experience.

With today’s news, IBM is placing the power of mobile analytics into the hands of iPad users with a free software download at Apple’s iTunes Store. The new software is designed to help employees in key industries such as financial services, healthcare, government, communications, retail, and travel and transportation use and benefit from business analytics on the go.

Organizations of all sizes are struggling to keep up with the rate and pace of big data and use it in a meaningful way to improve products, services, or the customer experience. 

Every day, people create the equivalent of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data from sensors, mobile devices, online transactions, and social networks; so much that 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years.

Every month people send one billion Tweets and post 30 billion messages on Facebook. Meanwhile, more than 1 trillion mobile devices are in use today and mobile commerce is expected to reach $31 billion by 2016.

A 2010 IBM/MIT Sloan Management Review survey of 3,000 executives across 30 industries from 100 countries reveals that 60 percent of respondents said they have more data than they can effectively use.

A new IBM study of 1,700 chief marketing officers from 19 industries and 64 countries further exposes this issue with 71 percent saying their organizations are unprepared to handle the explosion of big data. 

To address these challenges, IBM is delivering new analytics and information management offerings, and skills resources to make it easier to explore and capitalize on big data:

•  New Hadoop-based analytics software on the cloud that can be up and running in less than 30 minutes.  The new software helps employees tap into massive amounts of unstructured data from a variety of sources including social networks, mobile devices and sensors.
• New mobile analytics software for iPad users that makes it easy to explore any type of data on the go with location-aware analytics. Clients can download the free app here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibm-cognos-mobile/id455326089?mt=8
• New predictive analytics software with a mapping feature that can be used across industries for marketing campaigns, retail store allocation, crime prevention, and academic assessment.
• New software that sifts through all types of data behind the scenes and ranks its quality, makes it secure, and ensures business decisions are based on trusted data.

Big Data Analytics On The Cloud

IBM InfoSphere BigInsights on the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise makes big data analytics accessible for any user inside an organization.

Like the on-premise version, BigInsights on the cloud analyzes traditional structured data found in databases along with unstructured data — such as text, video, audio, images, social media, click streams, log files, weather data — allowing decision makers to act on it quickly. Bringing big data analytics to the cloud means clients can capture and analyze any data without the need for Hadoop skills, or having to install, run, or maintain hardware and software.

BigInsights on the cloud is available in both basic and enterprise editions with the options of public, private and hybrid cloud deployments. The basic edition is an entry-level offering available at no-charge that helps organizations learn how to do big data analytics including “what-if” scenarios with its BigSheets component.

Clients can seamlessly move to the enterprise edition when ready and set up Hadoop clusters in under 30 minutes to start analyzing data with low usage rates starting at $0.60 (US) per cluster, per hour. Both versions include a developer sandbox where clients can develop a new generation of business analytics applications complete with tools and a test and development environment.

Today, market leaders in banking, insurance, retail, communications and digital entertainment are using BigInsights on the cloud to analyze massive amounts of unstructured data.

These clients are analyzing data flowing from social networks, sensors, mobile devices, log files, and voice and video systems to understand consumer sentiment, make computing networks and smart grids more secure, and create new customer experience programs.

IT professionals and students looking to build Hadoop skills can take advantage of IBM’s BigDataUniversity.com, a new web site where users can learn the basics of Hadoop, stream computing, open source software development, and database management techniques to prepare for careers as Data Scientists.

The site includes hundreds of easy-to-use tutorials, videos, and coding exercises geared to build Hadoop, BigInsights, DB2 and WebSphere skills, and many courses are free. More than 8,000  students worldwide have already registered from countries such as Brazil, Russia, China, India, Korea, and South Africa and the US.

Analytics In The Office And On The Road

IBM continues to advance business analytics for the 21st century workforce by delivering expanded mobile device support with IBM Cognos Mobile software for the iPad.

The software enables mobile workers to take their business analytics on the road whether offline or online, allowing for uninterrupted productivity. iPad users can enjoy a rich, visual business intelligence experience to analyze any data about their business including sales, customer, and financial data with reporting, dashboard and scorecards.

Cognos on iPad is designed to help employees in key industries such as financial services, healthcare, government, communications, retail, and travel and transportation use and benefit from analytics on the go.

For example, doctors and dentists can use it to analyze electronic medical records and show patients customized treatment plans and explain procedures based on that analysis; social workers can check the health and well being of children in foster homes throughout a city and update supervisors, police and courts on their status in real-time; and bankers and insurance agents can use it to analyze loan or policy data to create individual products or services for clients.

Cincinnati Zoo, one of the oldest zoos in the United States with more than 1.2 million visitors annually, uses Cognos on iPad to give management instant access, and a single view of visitor and business information to drive new revenue and improve member visits.

The flexibility of mobile business analytics allows managers to bring together sales and attendance data on their iPads from wherever they are inside the park to track purchase patterns and adjust marketing spend based on that information. Using Cognos software, the Zoo has increased in-park spending by 25 percent this year.

IBM Puts Predictive Analytics On The Map 

With today’s news, IBM is delivering new software that allows organizations to gain predictive intelligence on geographic data. Organizations can use the software to understand data, analyze trends, forecast, plan and validate assumptions to drive accurate conclusions.

SPSS Statistics 20.0 software includes a new mapping feature that gives users the ability to add a geographic dimension to analysis and reporting, and allows users to target, forecast, and plan by geographical areas.

This mapping feature can be used across industries to analyze data and create statistics for marketing campaign effectiveness, store allocation decisions in retail, to detect crime hot spots, and for student test score assessments. The software comes with views of the United States, countries, continents, and prebuilt map templates where users can quickly populate them with data including geospatial information from ESRI files.

Healthcare organizations can use the new software to visually pinpoint areas of high accident or illness rates, or identify differences in care across different regions of a state or country.

Government employees can analyze past and present census data by city block or in dense county populations, and identify high crime areas to allocate more law enforcement, or update tax and zoning changes. Direct marketers can locate their most profitable customer base and store locations to allocate advertising resources, and academia can use it to concentrate recruiting and alumni efforts geographically.

The scene from this morning's press conference at IBM Information On Demand 2011 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada.

New Software Speeds Governance of Big Data

Big data analytics can be a competitive advantage, however, the quality of the analysis is only as good as the data it’s fed, and the data itself has to be available to those who can use it.

IBM is the only vendor with a market-leading information integration and governance platform for big data that ensures only trusted information is delivered to business users and applications across the enterprise.

New IBM InfoSphere Information Server 8.7 software enables integration with Big Data as both a source and a target for information integration. The proven performance and parallel engine of Information Server provides the massive scalability required for big data. Also new in this release is a next generation connector to Netezza, built for balanced optimization and high performance, and packaged specifically for Netezza implementations, and an operations console to view system usage across all integration jobs, to improve productivity of integration projects.

New IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management 10 software unifies IBM’s market leading MDM capabilities into a single product that handles any MDM requirement. New features include integration with Business Process Management software for MDM-centric business processes, greater connectivity to consuming applications via adaptable service interfaces, and a shared matching engine that maintains the single version of the truth. MDM technology improves the outcome of Big Data analytics by providing a better understanding of customers, products, suppliers, employees and accounts for further analysis.

Clients Turn To IBM To Analyze Big Data 

With today news, IBM also announced that hundreds of new clients are turning to IBM to gain actionable insight on the broadest range of big data.

Whether it’s collecting data to manage the placement of windfarms, gauge customer sentiment on social media sites, or predict potentially fatal infections in hospitals, IBM is helping clients across every industry to put their data to work.

Clients such as Hertz, Beacon Institute, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Marine Institute Ireland, Technovated, [x+1], TerraEchos, University of Ontario Institute of Technology and Uppsala University are using IBM analytics technologies to address the growing volume, velocity and variety of big data, and use it to make decisions that are transforming their industries.

Additional examples include:

• Danish energy company Vestas Wind Systems is using IBM’s big data software to analyze petabytes of weather data to improve wind turbine placement for optimal energy output. Analysis that used to take weeks can now be done in under one hour.
• XO Communications has reduced its customer churn rates by nearly 50 percent using IBM SPSS predictive analytics software. The company can predict customer behaviors, spot trends, and identify those likely to switch to another carrier, allowing them to take steps to keep their most valuable customers.
• [x+1], an end-to-end digital marketing platform provider, is helping their clients realize a 20 percent growth in digital sales by analyzing massive volumes of advertising data in real-time using IBM Netezza technology.
• Worldwide advertising agency Ogilvy is using IBM’s analytics software for the iPad to help employees assign resources, track utilization rates, and identify new revenue opportunities on the fly.

To read about more clients that are tackling big data challenges with IBM analytics technologies, download the new IBM Big Data Book at http://www.ibm.com/bigdata.

Follow breaking news from Information On Demand 2011 on Twitter at #iod11.

Full ACM Interview On Social Intelligence

I was asked by a reporter for the Association For Computing Machinery (better known as the “ACM”) Web site to do an interview recently on the subject of social intelligence.

You can see the fruits of our interview here.  Paul Hyland, the reporter, did a nice job of synthesizing the essence of what we communicated in our email interview.

However, there were a few things left out that I felt would have been helpful to the audience, so I’m attaching the full email interview exchange below.

Social intelligence as a social media analysis discipline is still in its infancy, but at IBM we’ve been working in this arena for several years. Though I see much analysis and focus in the marketplace around the social analysis tools, there seems to be a deficit on some of the organizational and methodological approaches necessary for effective social intelligence gathering and actionability.

Hopefully the full interview below provides some insights into how many of us are thinking about this space inside IBM, and certainly I welcome comments and others’ observations on the subject!

• For those ACM News readers who aren’t familiar with the emerging concept of “social intelligence” (SI), can you give me a quick explanation of what it is all about and why it has become so important today? What are a few of the most obvious applications of SI?

I’m not going to try and speak for the entire industry, but will share an explanation of the concept as we’ve started to recognize it inside IBM.

Simply put, social intelligence is the gathering, management, and analysis of business intelligence via the social media.

Business intelligence, of course, can encompass a wide gamut of actionable data and insight that can assist organizations in their decision-making.

To answer the question of why it has become so important, it’s probably best to answer the last part of the question, as to what the most obvious applications of social intelligence are.

The importance is driven by the changing business realities that the advent of the social media represents.  There are now billions of people online around the globe, and those people represent a huge diversity of opinions, preferences, sentiments, and related expressions of interest across an even more diverse set of topics and issues.  That includes expressions that impact brands and organizations around the globe.

Those companies wishing to adapt, learn, and benefit from those expressions are well advised to “listen”to those conversations, and to work to glean useful information and insights from those expressions.

To do that effectively and efficiently requires organizations to establish new ways of gathering market insight and intelligence, this time via the social media, and to structure their social intelligence gathering efforts in a way that maximizes the benefit they get from the data and insight collected there.

Actual examples run the gamut of business functions.  PR and communications may be listening in order to understand the impact of a recent PR initiative…Marketing may be interested in understanding the awareness of a new product or service, or perhaps to understand how the competition is faring…support or CRM in a service business may be wanting to understand how happy customers are, or aren’t, with a new service initiative.  There are a garden variety of social intelligence mining opportunities.

• Talk to me a bit about the analysis of SI data, which is more import to our readers than is the gathering and management of SI data.  What are the key aspects involved in that analysis?

Great question.  Whenever I talk to people about social intelligence, I like to put it in some kind of a construct to help people get their heads around the opportunity it presents.

I refer to the four “O’s” – organization, opportunity, outcomes, and operations.

With respect to organization, you need to determine where in your company the social intelligence gathering and analysis function should reside, as that will help determine the type of insight and analysis you’re to gather.

Opportunity helps determine what you’ll eventually come to analyze.  If you’re an organization that largely markets products, your social intelligence analysis could well center around gathering product feature insights, or competitive insights.

The outcomes help put the analysis to practical use.  Too often, companies don’t listen with any sort of end in mind.  Establish a hypothesis and outline what it is that you’re looking to ultimately do with the intelligence you gather. That will help focus and bring clarity to how your organization will use its social intelligence.

Finally, operations.  Build an operational framework for taking action on your social intelligence.  Establish an organizational workflow and identify the constituents whom you will share and ask to act on the social intelligence you distribute.

Then, hold them accountable for the actions emerging from those insights.  Otherwise, you may soon find you’re just gathering intelligence for its own sake instead of actively leveraging the insights you gather from it to the betterment of your business.

I find that this is where too many organizations typically start their social intelligence journey, with the tools and vendors as opposed to what is it they wish to elicit from their efforts.

Go back and start with the four O’s above, THEN, as part of your conscious evaluation of what you’re trying to accomplish, you can start to outline what partner vendors or tools will be your best fit.

If you’ve read any of Forrester’s work in this area, you know they break this market into three key areas: Social dashboards, Multichannel Analytics Providers, and Listening Service Partners.

Full disclosure: IBM is in this business, with products like Cognos Consumer Insight (which would fall into the Multichannel Analytics category), but as a practicing marketer as well, we’ve examined and experimented with tools and vendors across this spectrum.

If you’re simply looking for a dashboard that allows you to monitor the landscape, and you’re going to establish a certain self-sufficiency, then the social dashboard approach may fit best for you.

If you need more handholding or professional services, or want a partner that can help you gather, analyze and even summarize your social intelligence, then an LSP would be warranted.

If you’re looking to gather data both in and outside the social media realm, structured and unstructured, then you’ll need a Multi-Channel Analytics Providers’ solution that can accommodate those unique requirements.

There are scores of vendors in each of these areas, and I’d be doing a disservice trying to mention certain tools without identifying specific use cases.  That said, here is a link to a wiki that was put together of some of the more notable social media monitoring solutions.

• I know that “social intelligence” is also a psychological term. Are you familiar with that term? In order to avoid confusing our readers, is there any connection between the two? I need to draw a distinction.

I was not aware of the psychological orientation of the term until you mentioned it, but upon looking it up on Wikipedia, I would certainly distinguish that original definition with what I’m referring to here.

That definition describes social intelligence as the exclusively human capacity to use very large brains to effectively navigate and negotiate complex social relationships and environments.

Earlier, I set this discussion up with the definition centering around social intelligence being the gathering, management, and analysis of business intelligence via the social media.

The distinction is pretty clear, although I would argue the former definition could be applicable with the social media definition if you were attempting to do a social network analysis of a group of people online, and trying to understand and negotiate the social relationships and environment (read: the social graph).  Otherwise, I think they’re pretty well distinct from one another.

• Can you provide a “further reading list” of sources of information on social intelligence for those readers who want to learn more.

I have my own personal preferences.  Since this is an emerging area, a lot of the useful insight you’ll find is on blogs and from people in the analyst’s community.

For the latter, I really like the work Forrester’s Zach Hofer Shall puts out around influence and what he refers to as “customer intelligence.”  Note, however, that though his blog is public, much of Forrester’s research is by subscription only.

I also like to keep up with work from the Altimeter Group, notably Jeremiah Owyang and Susan Etlinger.

And of course, it’s also helpful to follow blogs from some of the key vendors in this space.  A few names I’d suggest would include Converseon, Radian6, Cymfony, and Nielsen Online, among others.

• Is there anything else you’d like to add that might be relevant to our readers concerning SI that we haven’t covered here?

The easiest way to get up to speed on social intelligence is to practice.  Practice definitely makes more perfect in this emerging space.

You can easily practice your own form of simple, DIY social intelligence by establishing a few Google News/Blog alerts.  Perhaps you want to monitor a few keywords relevant to your competition.  Or scan the social media for mentions of your brand.

You don’t have to have a multi-million or –thousand dollar investment to get started, that’s the beauty and economics of social media.  So, do some basic monitoring to get going and build from there.

Also, work to educate your colleagues about the opportunity social intelligence presents by offering them up some insight that nobody has been able to collect.  That will help get and keep their attention, and give you the opportunity to make the case for getting investment to take your social intelligence to the next level.

Memorial Day Travel Whisperer

Happy Tuesday.

How was your long holiday weekend (for those of you in the U.S.)?

I know, hard to believe Tuesday could come around so quickly.

But let’s wallow in the long weekend just one moment longer.

Question: Have you ever ever wondered what kind of practical insight can be garnered from the social media, by what I like to call “social intelligence”?

Okay then, we’ll use data regarding the Memorial Day weekend travel as an example.

Before the long  weekend, IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services conducted an analysis of blog posts, Tweets, news sites, and other social media in the US which indicated that fewer travelers expected to cancel their Memorial Day Holiday trips compared with last year — and this despite the dramatic rise in the price of gas over the past six months.

During the project, analytics software was used to scan thousands of publicly-available social media postings relating to travel and Memorial Day.

The analysis focused on two six-month periods, November 20 to May 20 in both 2010 and 2011.

It identified more than 11,500 individual references to travel and Memorial Day, and revealed that 1.6 percent of posts in 2011 referenced canceling Memorial Day trips versus 2.8 percent in 2010.

Further analysis suggested that in 2010, with fuel costs hovering in the mid- to upper-$2.00/gallon range, online Memorial Day references tended to focus on the overall cost of travel (driving, hotels, entertainment, etc.)

This year, the references centered around the holiday itself, and references to gas prices were not substantially higher than in 2010.

See the topic cloud below for a visual representation of some of the key mentions from 2011.  In last year’s cloud, “travel cost” was the most mentioned meme.

IBM Fellow and CTO of IBM Global Business Services had this to say about this type of an approach can help businesses:

“As a marketplace of ideas and opinions, the Web can appear raucous and chaotic at times — but there is insight contained in all that data. A better understanding of what people are saying online can help retailers, hoteliers, transportation officials, and others with the extremely complicated process of forecasting demand.”

To learn more visit the IBM business analytics and optimization Website.

IBM Helps Texas Medical Group Better Serve Patients

It’s always nice to see an IBM customer win close to home.

Right here, in the heart of Texas, IBM today announced that Southeast Texas Medical Associates (SETMA) is using IBM business analytics software to gain greater insight into hospital readmissions and data that will help identify causes and design interventions.  This to prevent patients from having to return to the hospital soon after their discharge.

Not being a big fan of hospitals myself, that’s always a good thing.

Watch this video to learn how IBM’s partnership is helping Beaumont, Texas-based healthcare group SETMA streamline their administrative efforts even as they better serve patients through analytic-driven, outcome-based metrics.

SETMA, a primary healthcare group based in Beaumont, Texas (where my cousin and her family live) has seen significant results working with IBM. In just the first six months of the practice, SETMA has been able to cut the number of  patient hospital readmissions by twenty-two percent by helping doctors identify trends. They’ve also been able to assess treatment protocols to support the creation of more comprehensive post-hospital treatment care programs.

Additionally, SETMA physicians have been able to reduce time taken to evaluate patients data prior to treatment from a hours to a second.

According to an October 2010 study titled “Hospital Readmission: Influencing Factors Identified” at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), unplanned hospital readmission within 30 days — occurs in nearly one in five Medicare patients in the US.

These readmissions are not only extremely costly, but it can put the patient at higher risk of increased illness, and in some cases death.

Using Outcome-Based Business Analytics To Improve Healthcare

SETMA is utilizing IBM analytics software to identify the treatment interruptions and causes that lead a patient back into the hospital after discharge.

Physicians are collecting data on specific patient characteristics that did not require re-admission, beyond traditional information to include ethnicity, socioeconomic groups, the follow-up care received, and how much and how quickly they were able to receive that care, against those who were re-admitted for hospital treatment.

Dr. James Holly and the 29 physicians of the SETMA practice have also implemented preventative care programs by analyzing key data of their more than 7,500 patients, including comprehensive background information, demographics, types of treatments, history of prescription care, risk factors and outcomes.

IBM business analytics software enables the doctors to better assess trends in their patients, so they may quickly adjust medications or treatments.

Physicians Evaluating Cardiovascular Risk in One Second vs. an Hour

Prior to implementing its analytics solution, SETMA’s doctors would typically spend upwards of an hour evaluating data on individual patients.

Today, they are evaluating data points of patients with similar conditions across the entire practice, allowing them to evaluate trends and gain valuable insight around more effective ways to manage illness.

SETMA doctors are also calculating cardiovascular risk measures at each and every office visit, something that was typically unheard of before.

What used to take a physician over an hour to sit and calculate just one patient’s score by hand; can now be done in less than a second. With a simple click of the mouse, key data points are instantaneously captured into one report.

For example, a doctor can now point out key risk factors around relative heart age scores, so if the patient is 65 years of age, but is showing a relative heart age of 75 years, it allows the physician to discuss ways in which they can work together to adjust lifestyle choices to regulate those numbers.

In addition, patients are able to view, track and compare their own progress against other patients with similar conditions by providing patients access to data related to their own personal health goals, helping the physician offer a more personalized care environment.

In short, IBM is creating a smarter, more connected healthcare system that delivers better care with fewer mistakes, predicts and prevents diseases, and which empowers people to make better choices.

You can learn more about IBM smarter systems here.

POWER Overload

IBM announced today a slew of new servers, services, and software to help minimize the rising costs and complexities of operating modern data centers.

These new offerings are intended to help IBM clients around the globe reap the benefits of IBM’s three-year, $3 billion (U.S.) investment in POWER7 systems that are primed to handle new workloads and perform powerful, real-time business analytics.

The announcement includes new blade servers (see image below) built on IBM’s POWER7 workload-optimized systems’ design and new systems software design to reduce time to workload deployment.  They also include new services to help remotely implement the systems (and in turn reduce deployment costs by 25%).

In the announcement, IBM also announced that the POWER7 technology achieved record performance for a range of workloads.the same 64-bit POWER® technology at work in some of the world’s most critical data centers in government, research, finance and high-tech industries, among others.

The IBM BladeCenter PS700 takes advantage of the workload optimization features of POWER7 technology.

There are many facets and contours to this announcement, so to get the full read I would recommend you check out this press announcement and then follow the links to the information that will be most useful to you.

But make no mistake as to the headline here: More computing capacity at a lower price point designed to optimize your workloads faster in the pursuit of more actionable business insights.

Banking On IBM Industry Expertise

IBM has been relentlessly focused in recent weeks on the opportunity the smarter planet initiative presents to assist businesses in industry-specific contexts.

At Lotusphere in January, Lotus introduced its collaboration framework, which provided specific collaboration-oriented guidance across several industry-specific areas.

Last week in Las Vegas, IBM’s Mike Rhodin did the same for the integrated service management sector at IBM Pulse 2010.

Today, IBM announced that Whitney National Bank, with $12 billion in assets, has become a new banking customer and one that is utilizing IBM’s recently announced banking industry framework.

To compete in today’s dramatically altered financial playing field, banks must employ smarter banking strategies to achieve new levels of risk control, efficiency and customer service.

Whitney National Bank is using IBM technology across its regional banks to simplify its business practices, meet regulatory compliance and ensure transparency with customers.

Whitney can now extract key intelligence to obtain a full view of a customer’s transaction history — including a comprehensive analysis of sales trends and costs — to deliver more customized services and offerings. Increased visibility to this account data also empowers the bank’s customers to regulate their activities and expenses.

With industry consolidation, the number one priority of banks is to be able to assess liquidity.

After acquiring more than a dozen regional banks, Whitney National Bank faced the challenge of consolidating customer information and a host of disparate IT systems for checking and savings account management, online bill payment and loan processing.

Whitney National Bank is using IBM Cognos software to extract key intelligence to help it obtain a full view of its customer bases' behavior, including a comprehensive analysis of sales trends and costs, so it can deliver more customized services and offerings.

By integrating data from disparate IT systems, Whitney has been able to modernize its technology systems across regional branches to better manage risk and enhance customer service.

By using IBM’s Banking Industry Frameworks, Whitney National Bank is able to leverage pre-built industry-proven data and process models already employed by more than 250 financial institutions.

The bank is also migrating to IBM Power System with DB2 in its data centers in Allen, Texas and Prattville, Alabama.

Whitney National Bank is the latest example of how the right combination of hardware and software can be fine-tuned to meet the specific demands of banks.

Weathering The Storm With Business Intelligence

Top-performing companies are 15 times more likely to apply analytics to strategic decisions than their underperforming peers.

This from a new IBM study on the role information-based decision making is playing in successful business strategies during these tough economic times.

Top performers were also 22 times more prepared to challenge the status quo in their organizations, rethink their current strategies and business processes, and aggressively apply and act on new insights derived from analytics.

The study also found that top performers were six times more likely to entrust a broader base of employees with greater authority to make decisions and act on insights.

Entitled “Breaking Away With Business Analytics and Optimization,” the study was based on a blind survey of nearly 400 business executives globally, who rated their businesses versus their peers.

It was published by the IBM Institute for Business Value and is available here.

As part of the analysis, IBM consultants determined that top-performing organizations are able to more fully exploit business analytics for competitive advantage.

The study also revealed that having superior data governance — assuring that data definitions were clear, relevant and accepted — is critical to success for the top performers.

In fact, by a factor of three to one, the study found that top performers were much more sophisticated in their approach to governing organizational information relative to lower performing companies (42 percent versus 14 percent).

IBM itself is actually one of the leading users of analytics in the industry.

Our own Blue Insight initiative is a cloud computing environment that will soon be gathering information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores, providing analytics on more than a petabyte and helping IBM sales and marketing teams to better predict which products and services will deliver the most value to our clients.

Today, at 3 PM EST, check in with the IBM New Intelligence Video studio to learn more about this study and about how IBM’s Business Analytics and Optimization Global Business Services organization may be able to help your company improve its decision making with actionable insight.

Mashing Pumpkins: New IBM Cognos Mashup Tool

I remember my first mashup.

It changed the way I thought about the Internet.

You’re hearing from someone who still remembers gopher and WAIS, mind you.

But you never forget your first mashup.

Mine was HousingMaps…as I’m sure it was for so many others.

But to see the geospatial relationship between Craig’s List apartment listings and Google Maps…well, it was like seeing Geranimals for the first time.

The mixing and matching provided an elegant intersection of two critical information sets, and in the process revealed all kinds of information that otherwise would have remained hidden.

But there’s another first…So far as I know, this is the first time IBM has ever released breaking news, unembargoed, to bloggers in advance of the major media.

For my money, even as an IBM communications person, we’ve just passed a milestone not unlike the bump we passed over with the advent of HousingMaps.

And so here’s the news: As part of its continued focus on business analytics, IBM is announcing tomorrow…err, tonight…an expansion of its industry-leading enterprise mashup portfolio.

This includes the latest version of IBM Mashup Center, as well as a new offering from our friends at Cognos, the IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service.

IBM is also announcing some new clients that are already gaining value and helping their organizations use information as a strategic asset (another key meme emerging here at Info on Demand 2009).

Here’s the mindblower: Every day more than 15 petabytes of data are created, and mashups can help folks make sense of too much information (there it is again).

Mashup technologies can empower not only the business decision makers — they can also help decision-makers at the employee level to gain new insights from previously hard to access data (from places far and wide, say, like the Cloud?)

By way of example, Kent County in the U.K. is using IBM mashup technology to bring transparency to government, by offering its citizens a pilot program with 570 different information feeds that can be combined and shared online.

Sunshine, my only sunshine…you make me happy, when MPs are expensing their moats….

So let’s say you’re moving out to Ramsgate and you want to build a mashup that reveals several variables: average household income, school enrollment levels, location of doctors accepting new patients…you get the gist.

In terms of the hard news, the new IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service provides an API that automatically and securely exposes content from IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence as a Web service for use in other operational applications, business processes, and mashups.

This capability is going to help Cognos BI end users to more easily (and quickly) make informed business decisions in their daily context.

People like me!  People who are constantly being asked for the latest and greatest Web metrics data, for example!

Call it useful IT for the common people!  Woo hoo!

By way of example, say you have Dilbert the sales manager who is responsible for many retail outlets.

This new tool will help Dilbert easily overlay sales reports onto his GIS app to gain a quick, visual snapshot of store performance and, more specifically, identify trouble spots where they’re not selling as many Dilbert pellets.

That way, he knows who to sic Dogbert on to increase those pellet sales!

In conclusion…did I really just write that?…The latest version of IBM Mashup Center software is expected to be available in November, IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service in December.

You can check out details of the Cognos solution on SlideShare.