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Business Analytics and Optimization, IBM and Social Marketing

One word? Analytics

  • Author: Adam Gartenberg
  • January 9, 2012
  • Category:  IBM  Analytics  BAO 

This piece by Marketplace's Bob Moon highlights what's top of mind for IBM's new CEO, Ginni Rometty (and it should be a familiar theme for those of you that read this blog regularly).

Bob Moon: If Virginia Rometty had just one word for you about the next big thing, it might sound a bit reminiscent of that famous scene from "The Graduate."

"The Graduate" clip: Just one word. Yes, sir? Are you listening? Yes I am. Plastics.

That is so 1960s. Just ask IBM's incoming chief what she's focusing on. Are you listening?

Virginia Rometty: Analytics.

Yep. Virginia Rometty sees a bright future for her company in... analytics.


The story goes on to quote from industry analysts Bobby Cameron and Rob Enderle describing just what this "Analytics" business is and why it's so important.  Watson makes a cameo appearance, too.

Link:  IBM's new CEO sees gold in data mining

New Smarter Analytics ad: Smarter by the Second

  • Author: Adam Gartenberg
  • January 3, 2012
  • Category:  IBM  BAO 

IBM is starting the new year with some new advertising around Smarter Analytics, among other featured topics.



You might have caught this spot during the Rose Bowl or Gator Bowl or some of the Sunday morning US news shows this week.  The IBMer featured is Simon Thomas, Business Analytics and Optimization Service Line Leader, and the ad uses examples from three different industries to demonstrate what's new in Smarter Analytics - and what can happen in an instant:

"A second is a very long time.  Long enough for a train track in Taiwan to sense a malfunction and alert the operators.  Or to spot a power disruption in Texas before it spreads.  Or help a global finance company pinpoint fraud and protect customers.  Smarter Analytics is helping companies all over the world predict what's coming and act on it now."


IBM has also posted a deeper, 3-min look into the concepts covered in the ad (below), and you can always learn more about Business Analytics and Optimization on our website.

IBM Business Analytics Helps Improve Customer Retention by Nearly 50 Percent at XO Communications

  • Author: Adam Gartenberg
  • October 25, 2011
  • Category:  iod11  IBM  SPSS 

Here's a great example of the tangible benefits companies can see by applying analytics to their business.  XO Communications has reduced customer churn rates by nearly 50%, largely through the use of IBM's predictive analytics software.  

According to independent analyst firm Nucleus Research, XO recorded an 376 percent ROI in just 5 months, an average annual benefit of $3,819,200 million. (You can download the full case study here.)



From the press release:  

LAS VEGAS, N.V. - 25 Oct 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that XO Communications, a leading nationwide provider of advanced broadband communications services and solutions, has reduced its customer churn rates by nearly 50 percent, largely through the use of IBM predictive analytics software. The software has helped save XO millions of dollars by uncovering deeper insights into customer behaviors, spotting trends, identifying those likely to defect, allowing proactive actions to keep their most valuable customers.


Press Release:  IBM Business Analytics Helps Improve Customer Retention by Nearly 50 Percent at XO Communications

New Netezza Appliances Helps Communications Services Providers

  • Author: Adam Gartenberg
  • October 25, 2011
  • Category:  IOD11  IBM  Netezza 

You might not think about it often, there's a flip-side to the convenience that you and I receive from carrying around now-ubiquitous mobile devices.  As the number of Smartphones is expected to quadruple over the next 4 years, reaching 2 billion devices by 2015, the communication services providers (CSPs) that connect those devices and route all the data to and from them are being placed under more and more pressure to maintain service levels, offer new capabilities, and still maintain their profitability.

To help them with that challenge, IBM today announced the IBM Netezza Network Analytics Accelerator, which will allow CSPs to analyze customer data, calling plans and contract terms to better understand their customers, improve retention and offer new services.

LAS VEGAS - 25 Oct 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new network intelligence analytics appliance to help communications services providers (CSPs) analyze up to petabytes of customer and network data in minutes. The new appliance gives CSPs the power to turn their data into valuable insights to enhance the customer experience, secure new customers, generate cost savings, and track the overall health of the network.

CSPs are challenged to boost revenue and keep costs low at a time when customers are demanding more data-intensive products and services. The explosion of Smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices means consumers can do just about anything on the go, from checking the weather to watching movies, and posting to Twitter or Facebook while downloading music. This digital lifestyle has consumers crunching ever-growing amounts of data for browsing, streaming video, gaming, and social networking, placing a strain on network resources.  

The IBM Netezza Network Analytics Accelerator addresses this issue and provides an analytics platform that CSPs can use to improve network performance and gain insights on customer experiences. Using the new appliance, CSPs can slice and dice customer data to analyze calling plans and contract terms to see which are driving revenue, understand how each customer is using voice and data packages and the impact on network resources, and spot new market opportunities by learning how customers use different types of handsets.
...
Most network analytic offerings only look at specific systems or network devices, retain certain information for a short amount of time, and have limited reporting capabilities and rigid data access. This inhibits a CSP's ability to identify patterns and trends or ask questions on-the-fly. Netezza analytics can view all customer data and speed up the flow for instant analysis on demand.


Press Release:  IBM Launches Netezza Appliance to Help Communications Services Providers Analyze Networks and Gain Consumer Insight

New IBM Software Helps Analyze The World’s Data For Healthcare Transformation

If you attended this morning's general session at IOD (or caught it on Livestream), you would have heard several speakers talk about healthcare as a focus for the first real-world application for Watson.

Today comes the announcement (New IBM Software Helps Analyze The World's Data For Healthcare Transformation) of new software to help the healthcare industry improve patient care and reduce costs by applying content analytics software similar to what's found in the Jeopardy-playing Watson.

Seton Healthcare Family is the first client to adopt and use the technology, called IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare. The solution will allow healthcare organizations to extract relevant clinical information from vast amounts of patient data to better analyze the past, understand the present, and predict future outcomes.

By combining IBM's Watson technology with industry solutions offerings, Seton intends to focus the new content and predictive analytics solution on the root causes of hospital readmissions, and ways it can decrease preventable multiple hospital visits.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, one in five patients suffer from preventable readmissions, which represents $17.4 billion of the current $102.6 billion Medicare budget.* Beginning in 2012, hospitals will be penalized for high readmission rates with reductions in Medicare discharge payments.


Press Release:  New IBM Software Helps Analyze The World's Data For Healthcare Transformation

IOD11 - Monday Announcements - Business Analytics and Big Data

As highlighted during this morning's general session, there will be a number of announcements coming out over the course of this week.

Today's press release (IBM Transforms Data At Work, Accelerates Big Data Analytics) summarizes the announcements around Business Analytics and Big Data, including new Hadoop-based analytics software on the cloud (that can be up and running in under 30 minutes), new mobile analytics software for the iPad (downloadable from the Apples Store), and new mapping capabilities for predictive analytics software.

LAS VEGAS - 24 Oct 2011: At the 2011 Business Analytics Forum, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today 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.
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: http://bit.ly/r68A04. 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. 


Link: IBM Transforms Data At Work, Accelerates Big Data Analytics

IOD11 - ECM Keynote

  • Author: Adam Gartenberg
  • October 24, 2011
  • Category:  IOD11 

Some quick highlights from the ECM Keynote from IOD 11:

Content at rest = Cost... Content in motion = Value.  Therefore, our focus is on augmenting systems of record with systems of engagement, unleashing the value of content in motion.

How businesses are using IBM ECM Solutions:

Wells Fargo - Swapnil Salonke - Imaging Services for Wells Fargo and John Murphy, IBM:

  • Wells Fargo processes around 100 million documents a month, 24x7
  • Wells Fargo undertook a transformation of their environment driven by a focus on the business value they were delivering to their customers.

Novartis - Scott Bancroft
  • Dealing with huge amounts of electronic and physical content (and physical content includes not just paper, but things like lab samples)
  • They have 300 shelf-kilometers of paper (equal to around 50 million pieces of paper)
  • Their Global master Retention Management System is designed to bring all records together under the same classification system and legally defensible retention policy
  • It's designed to be managed at a global, country and state level, while also offering flexibility at the local level.
  • It is very intuitive, with end users requiring only 15 minutes of training out on the site.

Seton Healthcare Family - Dr. David Ramirez
  • Not for profit healthcare provider in central Texas.  
  • About 1/3 of their patients can't pay for care, and they essentially donate $300M in charity care a year.
  • They are going to be applying Watson to better treat patients coming in with Congestive Heart Failure.  Nationwide, around 50% of CHF cases are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, and half of that should be avoided.

SEB - Simon Hancorn
  • SEB is a large Nordic Bank, operating in 10 countries in Europe
  • They need to keep track of many different types of information under intense time pressure, and handle about 100,000 cases a month across 350 different case types.
  • Their initial approach was to keep automating their processes, but found that doing so would have taken so much time and expense that they went looking for other options.
  • They are replacing their workflow engine with IBM Case Manager, now have a new archive based on FileNet P8, and are providing reporting and statistics via IBM Case Manager.



"A story was being told by our guests and we couldn’t see it"

  • Author: Adam Gartenberg
  • October 24, 2011
  • Category:  IOD11 

"We realized there was a story being told to us by our guests, and we couldn't see it."

The above quote, by John Lucas, Director of Operations for the Cincinatti Zoo, was another one that really struck me during this morning's IOD press conference.

The zoo - the second oldest in the United States - had the foresight to realize that while they wanted to be taking a customer-centric view, their existing information infrastructure was prohibiting them from doing so.

As I've written about previously, the zoo has deployed Cognos 10, allowing them to completely turn around their approach to analyzing and extracting insight from data that previously had been scattered across the organization (if available at all).

The result has been what John described as very deep consumer insight on visitation and spending at an individual guest level.

One of the insights he shared was that weather drives a lot of their business.  While this by itself isn't necessarily a big surprise, a discovery they made is that it effects different segments of their business in different ways.  For example, the zoo's members are much more temperature sensitive than non-members (above 90 degrees, member attendance drops off significantly.)

John also brought an iPad with him on stage as a way of demonstrating the importance of having data that is available and consumable from anywhere.  Being able to access Cognos on the iPad allows him and his colleagues to spend time out in the park with their guests (where they should be), and yet never be far away from the data they need to keep the business running.

The zoo has identified $500,000 in new revenue generated directly as a result of their deployment of Cognos, a significant impact for a business of their size.

Imagine if you put the Hoover Dam in the wrong place

"Imagine if you put the Hoover Dam in the wrong place"

The above quote came from Lars Christian Christiansen, Vice President of Plant Siting and Forecasting from Vestas Wind Systems, the world's largest producer of wind turbines.  Lars joined IBM executives at a press conference following this morning's general session, and the analogy he made was a very pointed one when you think about the business he is in.  

Vestas helps their clients place wind turbines in the right places, and to extend the analogy above, the Hoover Dam produces the same power as about 600 wind turbines. (And for a little perspective, Vestas currently monitors about 16,000 turbines).  While the scope of erecting a wind turbine might not on the surface appear to be of the same scale as a construction project like the Hoover Dam, the implications of placing that turbine in anything less than its optimal location can be just as significant.

Vestas is using IBM BigInsights software and an IBM "Firestorm" supercomputer to analyze petabytes of data from a variety of sources - weather reports, weather forecast models, tidal phases, geospatial and sensor data to name just a few - to determine where their clients should place their wind turbines.  

This application of Big Data is allowing them to provide their clients with predictability and reliability, and to get them up and running quickly.



Press Release:  Vestas Wind Systems Turns to IBM Big Data Analytics for Smarter Wind Energy

IOD11 Conference Opening General Session

  • Author: Adam Gartenberg
  • October 24, 2011
  • Category:  IOD11  IBM 

I'm going to be live blogging the IOD 2011 Conference Opening General Session.  (Check back here for updates, or follow along live at http://www.ibm.co/iod11 )

First speaker - Jeff Jonas, IBM Distinguished Engineer.  
Enterprise Amensia - having two pieces of information in the organization that aren't connected.

Organizations are getting dumber - increase in available information, but large gap between sensemaking algorithms

Major retailer found two out of every thousand people they hired had already been arrested for stealing... from the same store!

Analogy between trying to extract value from enterprise data and trying to do a jigsaw puzzle (with missing pieces, duplicates and "false negatives")

Big Data. New Physics

  • More data: better the predictions
  • Lower false positives
  • Fewer false negatives
  • More data: bad data... good
  • Suddenly glad your data was not perfect.
  • More data:  less compute  [the last few puzzle pieces to put together go faster than the first ones]

Sense and Respond --> Explore and Reflect

Closing thoughts - The most competitive organizations are going to make sense of what they're doing while there's still time to do something about it.

Sarah Diamond - Managing Partner, Financial Services, IBM Global Business Services.
Firms must dramatically improve their levels of transparency and level of data and analytic capabilities to satisfy regulators, successfully manage risk and enable growth.

HP Bunaes - Senior Vice President Corporate Risk Management, SunTrust
  • In 5 years SunTrust made quantum leap in analytics.
  • Each region used to have to fend for itself.  Now standardized reporting as a shared service
  • Used to use Excel and ccess, now Data Warehouse and Business Analytics
  • Intranet portal fo one-stop shopping and self-service.
  • Now put customer in center - everything produced is client relationship based.
  • No more tower of Babel problem - standard definitions and quality metrics.
  • Can now do in seconds what used to take days to do.
  • Managers and lines of business used to divert hundreds of people to create reports, now they can focus on growing their business.

One of lines of business was in auto finance.  Could use tools and data to build sophisticated models on exposure to auto dealers at granular level.  Similarly, exposure to homebuilders.  Thanks to data, knew exactly what exposures where and knew strengths/weaknesses of every single builder.  Allowed to mitigate risk.  Residential mortgage business took a beating.  Could use tools to isolate areas of stress... concentrated in a few narrow segments, while most of the business held up well.  Informed loss mitigation strategies and could focus where stress was worst.  And could provide that to analysts, investors and regulators.

Paul Edmisten, Senior Vice President, Corporate Business Intelligence and Analytics, SunTrust
How take those capabilities and explore over Sun Trust.
Transform to take analytics across company.
Launched strategic initiative to differentiate based on analytics.  What was series of siloed teams has come together under common operating model.

Analytical value = managed data + talented people x embedded analytics

All 28,000 people in company needs to understand value of data (down to the teller).  

How use analytics:
1.        Risk Analytics- Understanding/modelling risk
2.        Finance Analytics- Increased value when overlay risk and finance analytics - e.g., risk-adjusted profitability.  (Probability of default for given protfolio)
3.        Operational Analytics- Call centers, lending operations, bank operations.  Embedding analytics inside of workflow systems and imaging.  Can be smarter in how process loans, be more effective and sensitive to clients' specific needs.  Or can use to determine where to place ATMs.
4.        Client Analytics - e.g., Amazon knows what you want to buy next... want to understand full relationship to better offer, bundle products.

Video highlighting benefits seen by companies like Directv and Pepsi

SVP IBM Software Solutions Business Group - Mike Rhodin
Outcomes that are possible when harness information and make it work for you instead of against you.
Innovation across industries is opening new possibilities for business optimization.
Analytics create a competitive advantage.  More organizations see analytics as competitive advantage.  57% increase in organizations citing it as an advantage over same survey in 2010.  
Organizations competing on analytics substantially outperform their peers - by 220%.
60% of CEOs agree they have more data than they can use effectively.
The performance gap is widening - Organizations that apply advanced analytics achieve more profit growth - 12x

Opportunities for analysts exist across the business:
71% of CMOs see data explosion as having the biggest impact
25% of CHROs using analytics to make future workforce decisions
74% of CFOs see a need for faster decision making.

By embedding analytics into the fabric of your business processes, businesses can anticipate and shape business outcomes.
  • Becker Underwood - 50% increase in inventory turns.  (They were making decisions based on rearview mirror.  Now can make more accurate predictions to better manage inventory.  More timely and accurate raw material orders.)
  • JM Family Enterprises - $2.1M annual call center savings
  • Santam Insurance (South Africa) - Saved $2.4M in just 4 months, improved claims processing by 70%.  Automatically scored each claim based on risk level and moved on to appropriate group to process.  Identified pattern of fraud by major crime syndicate in first 4 months, leading to $2.4M in savings.
  • Vivo (largest mobile provider in southern hemisphere) - Reduced campaign execution time by 86% by use of Unica.

Algorithmics - IBM closed acquisition last week.  Financial risk management - 4,000 risk factors monitored.

SVP Middleware Software, IBM Software Group - Robert LeBlanc
Possibilities today - Information from everywhere, radical flexibility, extreme scalability
We need to adapt to these changing set of requirements.
Key question: Is your information strategy bold enough?
  • Are you prioritizing and delivering specific business outcomes in your industry
  • Are you applying the right technology?
  • Do you have a proactive partnership between business and IT?
  • Have you made an investment in innovation, skills and IT efficiency?
  • Has your organization made a lasting commitment to strategic/cultural change?

Think about the platform you have that supports information, that supports what you're trying to do around analytics and information in your org.
  • HealthNow - needed one view of the client.  Now provide better care and are saving $5M a year.
  • Hennepin County (Minnesota).  Improving child welfare and saving $2.5M annually.  Integrated case management, across paper and electronic.  Now case workers have infor they need and can spend more time in field with clients.
  • Pacific Northwest Smart Grid - $178M smart grid project.  Tapping into new information sources.

GM, Information Management Software - Arvind Krishna
How harness info to turn into insights and turn insights into increasing revenue and profits.  The key is turning insight into action.

Announcements this week:
DB2 Analytics Accelerator - leveraging Netezza.  Improving speed of queries by 10-100 times
IMS 12 - doubling performance to 60k transactions per second
Both reduce cost of managing data

IBM Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare - natural language processing, speech, info from diverse sources.  
IBM Case Manager v5.1 - bringing together case management and business process management

InfoSphere MDM10
InfoSphere Information Server 8.7
InfoSphere Optim Test Data Management Self Service Center
--> Reduce time it takes to get capabilities into production.  

Cognos with native iPad support  (search Apple App Store for Cognos
Cognos BI v10.1.1 - Speed and Flexibility
Sneak peek in the labs - Analytics go Personal  (breakthrough analytics performance on the desktop)

Algorithmics - address market, credit, operational and liquidity risk

Q1 Labs - pending acquisition - managing security

InfoSphere BigInsights and InfoSphere Streams - bring together any data source, at any velocity, to generate insight; enterprise class platform to enable creative discovery

BAO Jumpstart Services - driving deep insights from over 2,000 client workshops that have done.

Lots of images of IBM Champions up on the screen.

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