#IBM: Going Mobile with two big announcements | Blog | @bob_sutor

IBM: Going Mobile with two big announcements | Blog | Bob Sutor

The 5th Annual Dancing for Joan is less than a month away!

Saturday, February 25th @7pm.  Marietta, Georgia.

Get your tickets or sponsorship packages today!  Visit www.dancingforjoan.org.

Dancing for Joan is a festive evening of cocktails, dinner, great music, dancing, silent auction, and a “call to action” in the fight against lung cancer.  It is a fun and exciting way to honor important contributors in the crusade and to raise the funds needed for research and awareness.

Read more about this event and The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund benefiting ALCMI here.

10 Steps to Effective Data Governance for SMBs #datagovernance

by Maria C. Villar and Theresa C. Kushner

This article was originally published at Information-Management.com on January 11th, 2012
© 2012 Information Management and SourceMedia, Inc.

Data Governance is an emerging business  priority. In a recent survey sponsored by IBM, two-thirds of all companies are implementing  or planning to implement a data governance program in the next  18 months.  Seventy percent see data governance growing in importance in the next three to five years.

This growing importance is supported by the business problems companies are experiencing and the high value they place on data governance solving these problems. While large companies are leading the way with data governance programs, the survey found half of smaller companies are involved or plan to be.

Yet, there is not a one-size-fits-all governance program for all companies.  How should business leaders in medium and small companies implement a data governance program that is both effective and fits with the company’s size and resources?

The importance of data management and data governance  is the first item business leaders need to understand in order to convince themselves, their managers and their employees of the need for improvement. In fact, the inability to communicate the value of managing data is a major obstacle for most companies, as cited in the survey. As a business leader in a medium-sized company, there are many management topics to tackle to ensure the company is financially successful and that customers, partners, employees and investors are satisfied. That is enough to keep business leaders busy, so why should they also care how the company’s important data is managed? Is that not the job of the technical and operations staff? The technical and operations staff should be involved in data management, but business leaders should be setting the priorities, rules and metrics to ensure the data supports the business needs.

Data errors cause significant business issues each year. Billing data quality issues result in millions of dollars in lost revenue. Embarrassing company communications to valued customers are caused by incorrect contact information such as names or gender. Data errors in financial reporting can cause penalties, financial restatements and incarcerations. Data security breaches can cause loss of confidence and broad negative press coverage. Sales forecasting inaccuracies can result in the company setting the wrong earnings expectations to the board or industry analysts. Many companies start data governance programs when data errors lead to these serious business issues. But why wait? Can any of this happen at your company? How confident are you that the important data in your company is accurate, complete and reliable for all the business processes served?  

Similar to people management, capital management and product management, data management is a business driven function that manages another important asset: a company’s business data. Not all business data has the same value and, therefore, not all business data needs to be managed with strong business leader involvement. In practice, about 20-to-30 percent of a company’s business  data is critical and strategic. Data governance is the data management activity that ensures the company’s most critical and strategic business data is acquired, created, updated, deleted and stored with proper processes, policies and people.

The 10 steps below offer medium-sized enterprises a practical approach for getting data management started.    

1. Take a business-driven approach to data management by tying your data activities to key business drivers and company goals such as mergers and acquisitions, business intelligence, business process re-engineering and addressing company process pain points. From the results of the previously mentioned survey, one of the biggest barriers to implementation is that data governance has a lower priority than other programs. By combining data governance with other key business projects, you circumvent this barrier.
2. Gather the top business leaders in your company and agree on a collaborative, business-driven approach to the next four steps. Appoint a leader in your organization to lead the data governance program during the initial design phase and a forum for ongoing operational reviews. This is a great staff assignment for a talented manager in your company.
3. Decide on the most critical and strategic business data to manage. For example, customer account and contact information may be more important in a service-oriented business and product price list and inventory may be prized by manufacturing while data that impacts financial reporting will be critical for all companies.
4. Decide what is required from the data to support the business needs and the decisions to be made. How often will the data need to be acquired and refreshed? What level of quality is needed? Which fields are mandatory? How should the data be protected for regulation and privacy concerns? For example, medical offices have higher standards regarding client data than do restaurants or retail outlets.
5. Name those accountable for ensuring the data selected in step 3 meets all the business needs identified in step 4. Accountable parties could be selected by either the function or department where the data is first created or the function or department that will get the most value from managing the data. For example, the marketing function can be selected to manage customer contact information, focusing on all business needs for this information, not just the marketing function’s needs.
6. Decide how to measure success by meeting the data requirements in step 4. Possible metrics could include data quality levels to be achieved, timeliness of reports or compliance to regulatory standards. Consider also business benefit metrics such as goals for cost improvements, new revenue acquired from upselling or cross selling, manual steps eliminated and supplier efficiencies. Tying data governance improvements to business benefits keeps the business leaders engaged in the program because they see results that affect them.
7. Review metrics on an ongoing basis with the parties who are accountable. Manage your data as you would your personnel with quarterly reviews and annual assessments. Better yet, if company leaders are already reviewing key business metrics in an ongoing forum, extend the forum to include the data metrics.  
8. Be actively involved in approving the policies, rules and standards associated with data use and management. A reasonable set of policies, rules and standards needs to be established by the accountable parties. These policies, rules and standards document to employees how the requirements are to be met in their everyday activities. Appropriate employee communication and training should also be scheduled. Business leaders should watch that these policies, rules and standards are reasonable, easy to implement and easy to understand, otherwise company employees will not follow them. All that is needed are a  few effective data policies.
9. Hold your management teams accountable for complying to the data policies, rules and standards. Communicating and training employees on their data policies, rules and standards responsibilities will only go so far to ensure they are followed.  Managers should hold employees accountable in their year-end evaluations, and managers should be held accountable for their team’s overall compliance. Accountable parties should report any exceptions to the department managers.
10. Fund the data management projects and resources. The data governance program may require a few specialized skills and IT capabilities in order to automate and monitor for success. The data governance program benefits  outweigh the incremental cost of governance. Key business leaders should review the data governance program funding each year against the metrics achieved and metrics to be expected and fund accordingly.

With these 10 business actions, your technical team can enable data management policies, rules and metrics with technology. Data governance tools and technology can automate many of the data creation and update functions while ensuring data quality standards are met. Existing reporting tools can be extended to monitor and track key data fields and data governance activities. While data governance programs can be started with spreadsheets and manual monitoring, technology enables employees to be more productive and more predictable.

Once the initial design of your data governance program is established, business operation teams can define the operating procedures and staff the operating data roles. These same operation  teams can also establish the ongoing metric reviews with the accountable parties and track issues and work items. As the leader in  your company, these 10 practical steps will set the company on the path to effective data management and empower your employees to use their critical business data with confidence.

Maria C. Villar is a leader, consultant and writer in the field of enterprise information management, IT management and software development. She has held senior executive positions in both the technology and financial sector. Her information management accomplishments have been recognized by TDWI for best practices in data governance and business performance management. She has been recognized in Hispanic Business Magazine as one of the top 100 Influential Hispanics and received the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award. Maria has guest lectured on the topic of IT and information management in leading universities, industry conferences and Fortune 500 companies across the country and is an instructor at E-learningCurve. She also co-authored a book with Theresa Kushner, “Managing your Business Data: From Chaos to Confidence.”

Theresa C. Kushner is director of customer intelligence at Cisco Systems. She is a journalist-turned-marketer who has spent her entire career in high tech marketing with Texas Instruments, IBM and Cisco Systems. Her team is responsible for data quality and business intelligence governance for worldwide marketing. Kushner has worked closely with IT throughout her career.

#IBM smashes Moore's Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms

Instead of just storing all your songs of a drive, breakthrough also will let you store all your videos

by Lucas Mearian
Originally published by Computerworld on January 12, 2012 (Computerworld)

IBM announced Thursday that after five years of work, its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms required to create a bit of data.

The breakthrough may someday allow data storage hardware manufacturers to produce products with capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than today's hard disk and flash drives.

"Looking at this conservatively ... instead of 1TB on a device you'd have 100TB to 150TB. Instead of being able to store all your songs on a drive, you'd be able to have all your videos on the device," said Andreas Heinrich, IBM Research Staff Member and lead investigator on this project.

Today, storage devices use ferromagnetic materials where the spin of atoms are aligned or in the same direction.

The IBM researchers used an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism, where atoms spin in opposite directions, allowing scientists to create an experimental atomic-scale magnet memory that is at least 100 times denser than today's hard disk drives and solid-state memory chips.

The technology could also someday be applied to tape media.

While the science behind what IBM researchers accomplished is complex, the results are quite simple: They put a spin on the old adage that "opposites attract."

Instead today's method for magnetic storage where iron atoms are lined up with the same magnetic polarization, requiring greater distance between them, IBM created atoms with opposite magnetization, pulling them more tightly together.

"Moore's Law is basically the drive of the industry to shrink components down little by little and then solve the engineering challenges that go along with that but keeping the basic concepts the same. The basic concepts of magnetic data storage or even transistors haven't really changed over the past 20 years," Heinrich said. "The ultimate end of Moore's Law is a single atom. That's where we come in."

The researchers started with one iron atom and used the tip of scanning tunneling microscope to switch magnetic information in successive atoms. They worked their way up until eventually they succeeded in storing one bit of magnetic information reliably in 12 atoms. The tip of the scanning tunneling microscope was then used to switch the magnetic information in the bits from a zero to a one and back again, allowing researchers to store information.

Scanning tunneling microscope image of twelve iron atoms that were assembled into an atomically precise antiferromagnet (source: IBM Research)

IBM used iron atoms on copper nitrate to perform its experiments, but other materials could theoretically require even fewer atoms to store a bit of data.

The experiment was performed at low temperature: about 1 degree Kelvin, which corresponds to about -272 °C (-458 °F). The byte starts switching randomly about once a minute due to thermal energy (heat) at about 5 degrees Kelvin.

"We use low temperatures because it enables us to start from one atom and assemble bigger and bigger structures while keeping an eye on their magnetic properties. The more atoms we use to make each bit, the more stable the bits become. We anticipate that in order to make bits of this type that are stable at room temperature would require about 150 atoms per bit (rather than 12 atoms at low temperatures)," an IBM spokesman said.

The researchers then combined 96 atoms to make one byte of data, such as a letter or number. IBM then put many of the bytes together to create information. The first word they spelled using the new technique: THINK, which required five bytes of information or 480 magnetized atoms.

"The atomic scale magnetic data storage is orders of magnitude smaller than a single conventional bit," Heinrich said.

Heinrich is quick to point out that the breakthrough is more theoretical than practical at this point; storage manufacturers aren't going to build a storage devices that use a scanning tunneling microscope to switch bits back and forth to store data.

But the research proves storage mediums can be vastly denser than they are today.

"If you look at magnetic data storage element in a solid state device, like a spintronics device [also known as magnetoelectronics] or in a hard disk drive, you have about one million atoms in each bit," Heinrich said. "So you have a lot of leeway from where we currently are."

Miniaturized information storage in atomic-scale antiferromagnets. The binary representation of the letter 'S' (01010011) was stored in the Neel states of eight iron atom arrays (source: IBM Research)

Heinrich predicted that devices using IBM's new method of data storage would take five to 10 years to develop, but the research is critical in that it proves previous theoretical limits to data storage do not exist.

"Using iron atoms on a copper nitrite surface is probably far from being a real technology. You don't want to build this with the tool we're using, which is a research tool," he said. "You want to build this cheaply for a mass environment, and that's a huge engineering challenge."

Antiferromagnets is not the only data storage project that IBM is working on. Last year, the company produced its first Racetrack Memory circuit, which could also lead to silicon chips with the capacity of today's hard drives, but the durability and performance of flash drives. Henrich, however, said Racetrack technology falls somewhere between today's storage mediums and IBM's most recent antiferromagnets discovery.

T-H-I-N-K ... This figure shows the a magnetic byte imaged 5 times in different magnetic states. A white signal on the right edge corresponds to logic 0 (and is labeled as such) and a blue signal to logic 1. Between two successive images the magnetic states of the bits were switched to encode the binary representation of the ASCII characters "THINK" (source: IBM Research) to allow them to use antiferromagnetic structures as active elements and then solve the all the technological problems around that," Heinrich added.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

#IBM Gives Birth to Amazing E-mail-less Man #SocialBusiness

by Robert McMillan

Originally published on Wired.com.  16 January 2012

When Luis Suarez decided to live in a world without e-mail, some of his colleagues thought he was making a mistake. After all, he works for IBM, one of the world’s top vendors of e-mail software.

IBM's Luis Suarez dumped e-mail four years ago. So far, he's shrunk his inbox by 98 percent. (Photo: Luis Suarez)

But Suarez was ready to cut the cord. Like any other 21st century white-collar worker, he was bombarded daily with around 40 e-mail messages. More than he wanted to answer.

Suarez — who cut his teeth in the 1990s at IBM’s mainframe tech support center in the Netherlands — is an affable guy. Four years ago, he was working on IBM’s BlueIQ social media team, helping IBM’s salesforce understand social media. It was a hot area, and people wanted to know more. Suarez had developed a reputation as one of IBM’s social media stars, and he was spending more time answering questions and delegating work via e-mail than he wanted. The questions kept coming, and privately, he was getting burned out. “I was getting tired of doing everyone else’s work instead of mine,” he says.

So in February 2008, he all but stopped sending e-mail. He didn’t wipe out his inbox. In fact, he still checks e-mail daily — it takes him about two minutes per day; most messages are internal meeting notifications — and he still uses it for sensitive one-on-one conversations. But for the most part, when people write him, he answers via social media and suggests that they’d be better off chatting via Twitter, Google+, or on Connections, IBM’s internal social network. The idea is that if more of his communication is in the open, he’ll spend less time communicating.

Luis Suarez is an extreme case. But he nicely represents the tech world’s gradual migration away from e-mail and onto social networks and other services. For many, services such as Facebook and Twitter have replaced e-mail, at least in part. Facebook has introduced e-mail addresses to encourage its more than 800 million users to keep their communication on its site, and even an old school tech giant like IBM is moving in this same direction.

Suarez may be the most famous IBMer to drop off the e-mail treadmill, but he isn’t the only one. He reckons that there are still several dozen colleagues who have done the same thing.

Juliana Leong is one of them. Like Suarez, she hasn’t totally done away with e-mail. But when coworkers send her a message, she replies with Connections. It’s more efficient, says Leong, a project manager with IBM’s Office of the CIO. Often, people who ask her questions in public get answers from Leong’s colleagues before she even gets a chance to read them. And those answers remain public, for others to see. That means there are fewer questions for Leong.

She says that her fellow IBMers are paying attention to Suarez.

“He’s a very prominent person in the social community in IBM, so a lot of people like to follow his example,” she says. Exactly how effective they’ve been, Leong doesn’t know, but her office has made reducing e-mail a focus for 2012.

So four years into his brave experiment, Suarez is looking less like a crazy man on an island. (He literally lives on an island: Grand Canary Island, which he moved to a few years ago. He loves the “beaches, sun, and mountains.”) He’s looking more like a visionary.

Carbon Copy? Are You Kidding Me?

Last year, European technology services giant Atos said that it wants to get rid of e-mail by 2014 and a few weeks ago Volkswagen said it was going to turn off BlackBerry e-mail access to some staffers during non-work hours.

When IBM’s new CEO Ginni Rometty released her first message to company employees earlier this month, she posted a video to Connections, rather than sending out a corporate e-mail blast.

Facebook is trying to move users to its own messaging service, something that goes beyond e-mail and instant messages. E-mail alone is too slow, and archaic, according to Molly Graham, who works with Facebook’s mobile group. “Look at that line that we use every day called CC. What does CC even stand for? It stands for carbon copy, which is insane,” she said in November at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara. “What does that even mean in today’s world’

“When we were doing research for our messaging product, we actually looked at what subject lines people used. And like 80 percent of subject lines are “hey,” “hi,” or left blank. The subject line is outdated. The truth is, e-mail is outdated.”

Though he’s IBM’s poster boy for dropping out of e-mail, even Suarez admits that the inbox and carbon-copy will probably never completely go away. But four years into his experiment, he feels more productive, and almost all of his work is done in the open.

For Suarez, it’s not just more efficient. It’s a nicer way to communicate. There’s a “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” kind of passive-aggressiveness to the way many people use corporate e-mail, with the strategic bcc and the cover-your-ass e-mail message. “If you have been using e-mail in a corporate environment, you know that plenty of people use e-mail as a weapon against their own colleagues,” he says. “This was also creating a new way of working where you wouldn't need to justify the work you did. You earned trust from your colleagues by being a lot more public, a lot more open and a lot more transparent in what you do.”

And there’s one more thing. Suarez has lost about 50 pounds since 2008, a feat he at least partially credits to his e-mail aversion. “Since I’m no longer spending much time on e-mail during the day I’ve come up with other things to do,” he says.

#Cancer Treatment: Are Personalized Molecular Profiles in Our Future?

From PBS NewsHour...

In the 40 years since the federal government promised to find a cure for cancer, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent and much has been learned. Still, the diseases continue to claim more lives each year. Health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser reports on the past, present and future of cancer treatment here.

#IBM Breaks U.S. Patent Record; Tops Patent List for 19th Straight Year

IBM inventors received more than 6,000 patents in 2011

ARMONK, N.Y. - 11 Jan 2012: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it set a new U.S. patent record in 2011, marking the 19th consecutive year that the company has led the annual list of patent recipients. IBM inventors earned a record 6,180 U.S. patents in 2011, more than quadrupling Hewlett-Packard’s issuances and exceeding by six times those of Oracle/Sun.

More than 8,000 IBMers residing in 46 different U.S. states and 36 countries are responsible for the company's record-breaking 2011 patent tally. IBM inventors who reside outside the U.S. contributed to more than 26% of the company's 2011 patents.

Read all about it here:  http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/36463.wss#release

#SmarterSoftware to build a #SmarterPlanet

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