Big Data and IBM's interest in Organization Design

Speaker A This conference is sponsored by a couple of by IBM and by Novus, and I'd like to invite Stephen Miller from IBM to give a few words.

Speaker B All right, thank you. Yeah. So this is my third day here, and I really enjoyed myself, and I've made a lot of new friends, which has been great. So I'd like to spend my time telling you a little bit about why is IBM here and why does IBM care. So at the beginning of this year, our CEO, Ginny Rometti became very vocal about that. Data is the new oil, that it's the natural resource that drives business and will be a game changer for everybody that's in business and such of that, she took IBM and did a major reorganization. They already had the Watson product that won Jeopardy. They created a whole new business unit around Watson, and they're moving into a brand new headquarters for Watson in Silicon Valley in Manhattan later this year. She also created another business unit that I'm a part of called Information and Analytics Group, which covers the broad gamut of all the technology to manage data, analyze data, get value from data. And they also reorganized part of Global Business Services to create a new unit in there called Strategy and Transformation, which is designed to help companies manage the change needed to fully get value from data. So that's really a tremendous set of change that IBM is undergoing to do that and as part of make this work in the ecosystem. So my job is I'm the ecosystem manager for talent and skills for information analytics group. So we care about the skills in the broader industry that are needed to take full advantage of data and analytics. So that means that there's new emerging roles like data scientist, like data engineer, data governance roles, there's lots more, right? But it's also at the C suite. So you're seeing new emerging roles like the chief analytics officer, the chief data officer, and this is all transforming how businesses need to behave and the skills that are needed. But frankly, it goes farther than that because as we talked about those of us who were part of the roundtable discussion earlier today, in one of the sessions, we talked about the need that every employee needs to be data and analytics capable, or they're not going to have a place in today's business going forward. So that's a big change from where we were, whereas that was a select thing that only a few people got trained in. So it's a new change and a new looking forward. It's a new reality. So you're looking at capabilities at every strata. Everybody needs to have capabilities here. They need to make sure that they're not going to embarrass their company by doing something stupid and unethical with their data, or they're not going to leave their laptop full of data in the backseat of their car and get stolen. I mean, we all hear about examples of that practically every week, right? People don't really understand what they're doing with data and the ramifications if they get it wrong. And they don't necessarily understand what happens when they get it right and how they can transform their business. And new businesses are being created that are all about data. So how many people in here use LinkedIn, right? So their business is all about data. Your data, my data. We voluntarily put our data into their site, and they build a business selling analytics around that data, helping you find jobs, helping you figure out what your opportunities are there's TripAdvisor, Yelp and Amazon has a huge data piece to it that you don't even really see. Then you have Google, right? Again, it's all about gathering everybody's data up and then selling it back to you. Is that through advertising and other things? And these are just the tip of the iceberg of what's happening. And there's a huge opportunity. But for companies to get full value for that opportunity, they need to address that in their organizational design and in understanding. Do they have the right people and their talent management at every level in their strata? Do they have the right executives? Do they need to establish new executive roles, like I mentioned, chief Analytics Officer, chief Data officer. So that's why we're here. And we've worked with Ken to infuse that into a lot of the curriculum during these five days. And we really hope that you take some thinking of that when you go back home about how can you do that in your consulting practice? How can you do that with the businesses that you represent and start thinking about how are you going to take full advantage of data as a natural resource, as the new oil? So thank you very much, and I look forward to meeting everyone that I haven't met. Thank you.