By Espie Angelica A. de Leon
Tech giant IBM Philippines encouraged CIOs (chief information officers) of local companies to redefine their roles and be technology disruptors themselves for their organizations to develop smarter apps and services and further expand their growth.
During the IBM Quarterly Coffee Session at Discovery Primea Hotel in Makati City on February 27, IBM executives discussed the interdependence between a company?s business growth and IT performance and how a combination of human intelligence, machine learning, and automation can help augment IT operations.
According to IBM president and country manager Luis Pineda and IBM director for client management for global technology services in Asean Gyanendra Pawahanee, the IT environment is becoming more complex with the emergence of artificial intelligence, IoT (Internet-of-Things), cloud, mobility, and other trends.
Hence, technology now becomes harder to manage, preventing IT leaders and customers from making decisions and resolving issues faster.
?We?re provoking them really to act now, before it?s too late, maybe to optimize and increase the agility of their data and cloud infrastructure to create an insight-driven organization,? said Pineda.
?We?re doing this because we believe that only by radically re-imagining their roles as CIO will they become the disruptors, and not be the disrupted. And by doing so they will be able to drive meaningful innovation that will truly transform their business and organization. ?
To address the problem of managing complex technologies and help CIOs re-invent their positions, IBM has come up with the first-of-its-kind IBM Services Platform with Watson fully built on the IBM Cloud.
Now being used by 800 clients for the past two years, IBM Services Platform with Watson is an open standards-based platform using cognitive capabilities.
Integrating technologies, services, and security, the platform supports the entire solution life cycle from end to end as it designs, builds, and runs quality and efficient IT services. It can predict potential problems and direct automation.
Meanwhile, its automation technologies can run diagnostics, understand technical requirements, detect operational gaps, provide and employ solutions to problems.
The platform uses IBM?s Data Lake and Knowledge Base which contain data from industries like banking, airlines, and retail, gathered during the company?s over 30 years of operation. The platform?s cognitive functions mine these data for knowledge and insights.
It has a Client Insights Dashboard which provides clients with real-time access and visibility to their IT environment, as well as automated service delivery technologies.
Lastly, the platform is powered by Watson which serves as the engine of the continuous feedback loop. It collects and analyzes data, generates insights, directs automation, and makes decisions based on data-driven insights. Watson also manages the hybrid cloud infrastructure from end to end.
Pawahanee explained that the downside of merely tapping human intelligence is that resolving issues in a complex IT environment such as those involving apps, servers, and storage capacities, takes a long time. The person solving it also has to be an expert. But if the problem solving process also includes machine learning, decisions are made faster and more easily.
IBM Philippines chief technology officer Lope Doromal added, ?When a customer describes their problem — the symptoms, the error, messages that they are seeing — Watson automatically takes that information and looks at the historical databases to sort of find out [if there have] been similar issues reported by other customers in the past. So internally, there?s already sort of a guide that our engineers will see. There?s a lot more capability here because this gives the customer direct access to that knowledge.?
Said Pineda, ?This is how major companies are, will be, or should be thinking about setting up their IT operations.?
Typically, the service engineer will have to look at IBM?s database to determine if a similar problem has occurred in the past and how it was resolved. IBM Services Platform with Watson eliminates this step in the procedure.
