Watson and Cognitive Meetup April 2017

Editor's Notes

• #2: 1
• #4: At the heart of every successful digital business or business model is data. Data has become key natural resource for business – not just your data, but external data sets like Weather Data, social data, and other open data sets that are freely available. Every 2 days, we generate as much data today as all of humanity did up to 2003. And only 0.5% of data being created is analyzed. So how does one refine the natural resource of data into useful finished product? Ultimately it is about apply multiple and advanced analytic techniques to refine the data down to key new and unexpected trends and insights. By adding external data to your internal data, the number of possible conclusions rise dramatically. Add in the ability to apply not just one advanced analytics techniques but many also creates new possibilities. Many of the these advanced techniques are support by technologies that are readily available via open source – and they continue to get better and more sophisticated as the innovation is driven by entire communities as well as many companies like IBM. Another key refining technique that needs to be applied to data is the need to develop insights faster than your competition and then translate that insight into action for the business. Lastly, it is important the companies mine for data everywhere, as there is hidden treasure in locations where you might have not looked before. Every process, every machine or device and every application has data and needs to have intelligence at its core.
• #5: What we’ve found in talking to our clients is there are really 4 areas where data plays a role in providing value to the business. While each area brings value, as we move from the left to the right, the end users feel they get more value as data becomes more accessible to them. This is not to say each area doesn’t carry value or there aren’t opportunities to improve each area – but the more accessible data becomes, the more valuable it becomes within the business. Use this maturity model to not only talk to clients about the increasing value they can get from their data, but it provides you the opportunity to take a pulse of where they’re at with their existing data infrastructure. Ask about each stage to determine areas for growth or change. There are opportunities to get more value in each stage of this maturity model. Here are some concrete examples: The Operations Stage depicts companies using data to run their day-to-day operations. We help companies manage their data more efficiently with higher performance, higher availability and lower costs. BPM Northwest, a services company, had a client that was hosting all their operational applications - such as HR, financial, etc. - on best of breed cloud platforms. This presented a challenge as they needed to integrate data between their applications for financial planning purposes. Within 1 day BPM Northwest was able to develop a prototype to demonstrate to the client how much time and money they could save using a dashDB/Bluemix automation platform. With the new platform in place – their client went from 2 days to 20 minutes of processing and reduced month-end closing costs by 25%. The Business Intelligence Stage is about companies providing data warehouses, data marts, and data lakes typically for end-user analysis. Frequently this data will be transformed or augmented with external and often unstructured data to provide a holistic view. In many cases clients leverage Hadoop, but the example we’re going to talk about utilizes dashDB and Cloudant. GameStop needed to develop a compelling app to engage clients that are more prone to virtual experiences. They wanted an app that could provide an engaging shopping experience as their clients visit their retail outlets. Gamestop needed a central data hub for all hosting client, game and vendor information and chose a combination of Cloudant and dashDB. Using bluemix – Gamestop created a captivating app that keeps their customers coming back to their stores. Self-Service Analytics is a form of business intelligence in which line-of-business professionals or data scientists are enabled and encouraged to perform queries and generate reports on their own, with nominal IT support. In 2015 Marriott shared with the audience at the Insight conference their experiences in building a self-service environment. Like IBM, Marriott has a Cloud First methodology and because they needed data that originates in the cloud, it only made sense they pursue a cloud-based data solution to fulfill their requirements. Through the use of our BigInsights on Cloud and leveraging the Big SQL technology, Marriott has provided their data science community the technology they need to “prototype ideas before productizing”. Finally as we reach the far right of the maturity curve, these are businesses that have actually transformed their business into New Business Models based on insights they get from their data. Nationwide is a great example for this. Nationwide, like any insurance company, competes on price. However, it’s a always a balancing act between pricing premiums and the potential risk of costly claims. Nationwide put in place an innovative consumer facing program called SmartRide. With the use of telematics, Nationwide can collect driving data and formulate the risk factor associated with each driver. This risk factor is then translated into discounts they can offer the driver. In the first 3 months of their launch – over 60k users have accessed the site and 90% of those are new users.
• #13: Runkeeper: An iOS/Android mobile fitness app that guides and tracks user activity and provides motivation and allows users to monitor progress toward goals. It has >50 million users, 3+ million routes, available in ~200 countries, and >100 third-party integrations. Success Criteria: Build more personalized interactions for users based on wealth of data, gain deeper understanding of personalities and preferences of a global community, and increase customer loyalty and engagement to continue growing user base. Solution & Results: IBM cloud data and analytics services tackled goals from every angle to create more meaningful, immersive experiences for individual users: Cloudant captures location and integrates with Graph to personalize route recommendations dashDB uncovers insights using multiple sources to optimize app performance and drive new services Watson Analytics provides deeper understanding of user communities based on social data Watson Personality Insights uses social data to create personality profiles for market segmentation The Weather Company data enhances context for the optimal conditions to run specific routes More detailed overview of the RunKeeper use cases is here: https://ibm.box.com/s/7g0ldw8ckn36huv0v6qms3zzm3xvlf4k.
• #14: Client: Copenhagen Business School who helps with the Roskilde Festival in Denmark; the largest North European culture and music festival. Run since 1971 by a non-profit, non-political society that supports humanitarian and cultural work, the ten-day festival hosts some of the biggest names in music and attracts 130,000 visitors annually. Business Challenge How do you keep 130,000 guests safely entertained, fed, watered and informed in a sustainable way? Roskilde Festival knew that the critical insights lay hidden in huge volumes of real-time data. The Benefit Enables vital insight into where people go and what they buy, driving smarter optimization in crowd safety and service provision. Extreme scalability enables deeper analysis of near-real-time data. Pull Quote “dashDB, SPSS and Watson Analytics enabled us to process, store and analyze huge volumes of data.” —Per Østergaard Jacobsen, External Lector and Project Manager, Copenhagen Business School Solution Components IBM® Bluemix® IBM dashDB™ SoftLayer® IBM SPSS® Modeler IBM Watson™ Analytics Case Study Link http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=AB&infotype=PM&htmlfid=CDC12349USEN&attachment=CDC12349USEN.PDF Additional details within the CDS use cases: https://ibm.box.com/s/fmm2howoxj4ba4dcovcbnlp1prd31cqr
• #15: Sophisticated content rights management, advanced advertising and marketing with IBM Analytics RSG Media is a global leader in delivering software and services that help the world’s largest and most successful media companies – cable and broadcast, entertainment, games and publishing firms – maximize revenue from their content, advertising and marketing inventories. Business benefits: 4.13% lift in viewership and $6 million boost in revenue for one client with optimized scheduling $50 million lift per year in a client’s bottom line via advertising analytics and yield optimization 17.5% increase in new viewers using 15% less marketing inventory for a leading cable network Solution components IBM® Cloudant® IBM dashDB® IBM Watson™ Analytics IBM Bluemix® IBM Analytics for Apache Spark Additional details within the CDS use cases: https://ibm.box.com/s/fmm2howoxj4ba4dcovcbnlp1prd31cqr
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