We’re putting the platform to work for live events, webcasts and new kinds of online video programming, and also collecting clips into libraries such as Smarter Healthcare, Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy and of course the new intelligence of Smarter Analytics.
You can embed or share the channel, libraries and clips in many new ways, so stop by. We planning more exciting live webcasts and events, so stay tuned!
The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.
“New York has been a pioneer among cities in the use of computing firepower to sift through data to improve services. It began in the 1990s with the city’s CompStat system for mapping, identifying and predicting crime. The system, combined with new policing practices, reduced crime rates in New York and was later adopted by Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore and other cities.
In 2002, the city began its “311” telephone number for answering questions about government services and to report problems down to missing manhole covers. The service receives 50,000 calls a day, and earlier this year began operating on the Web as well. Complaints, response times and resolved problems are tracked and measured to improve performance.
In 2006, the city began an online service, NYC Business Express, to make it easier and faster to start a business. The average time to obtain a building permit, for example, has been cut to 7 days from 40. Such seemingly mundane improvements can add up to big gains in the efficiency of government service systems, experts say, nurturing productivity and growth in local economies. The process, they say, is similar to “lean manufacturing,” a system first mastered by Toyota in which step-by-step changes on the factory floor, made repeatedly, translate into major advances in quality and productivity.”
For every dollar spent on wellness, companies can save $3. CNBC’s Jim Goldman looks at IBM’s plan to keep families healthy and employees happy. Healthy Horizons - CNBC.com
As in thrall as we may be to the firehose of new stuff drenching us in the here and now, occasionally we want to look a little further over the horizon. Two thoughts collided in the collective Labs brain a short while ago. By ‘collided’ we mean we saw a consequence of the relationship between the two that made us sit up and think:
1. The mass socialization of technology. 300 million + Facebook users can’t be wrong. We’re still in awe of how mainstream the adoption of technology has become and just how networked the world is. Increasingly the ‘loop’ never seems to close.
2. How ill-equipped we are to cope with the deluge. Natural human processing power is sadly finite and struggling to cope. Certainly, we know we’re not alone in adopting coping strategies like continuous partial attention and ignoring much beyond tomorrow or next week. Steve Rubel at Edelman also has written extensively on the attention crash and its relevance for marketers.
Photo: cluster of neural cells by Su-Chan Zhang, University Wisconsin-Madison
The emergence of new smarter systems which are interconnected and streaming real time information are presenting business and governments with a unique opportunity to transform decision making. New opportunities to use this data to predict business outcomes, optimize old systems and spot trends before they happen are actually a reality. IBM’s new service line, IBM Business Analytics and Optimization Services will draw on the company’s deep expertise in vertical industries, research, mathematics and information management to help clients both improve the speed and quality of business decisions while better understanding the consequences and business outcomes of those decisions.
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A couple weeks ago, IBM and InformationWeek sponsored a webinar, Optimize Business Performance by Building a Smarter Enterprise, to explore the topic of how companies are improving business processes and workflows in order to become a smarter, more agile enterprise.
A featured speaker on the webinar was James Surowiecki, world-renowned business strategist and author of the best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds. Also on the call was Jon Iwata, Chief Marketing Officer at IBM. Both of them spoke during the one hour videocast.
The way a company’s employees get their work done is a critical lever in optimizing business performance. But we all know you can improve business performance just by working harder or spending more on resources. You need to figure out how you can make your workforce work ‘smarter’. The secret is to create a collaborative and connected business environment that empowers people, embraces change and ultimately increases productivity.
Some facts about the way we work:
The time we spend just looking for the right expertise and information to do our jobs adds up to two hours in a typical day
A typical organization loses 5.3 hours per employee per week due to inefficient processes impacting how they work
Two-thirds of people believe there are colleagues who can help them do their jobs better…but they don’t know how to find them
To work smarter, we’ll need smarter organizations — enhancing and benefiting from their people’s expertise, enterprise and creativity, rather than inhibiting them. Transforming the collaborative infrastructure and processes of our places of work will enable people to take advantage of the full scope of an instrumented, interconnected and intelligent planet. And the good news is that many organizations around the world are showing the way. The rest of us need to pay attention to these innovative companies and learn from their case studies…then apply what we have learned to our own companies.
