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Sunday, November 1, 2009

IBM Happenings: August September October 2009

The months of August, September, and October were busy ones at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list of the current press releases here and an index for prior months here. In addition to the major focus on a "smarter planet", IBM is heavily engaged in healthcare both as an information technology and business solutions company but also as an employer..

In a bold move to cut healthcare costs, IBM plans to drop co-pays by employees when they visit their primary care physicians under the company's self-insured coverage. The idea is to save costs over time by encouraging people to go to primary-care doctors sooner in order to get earlier diagnoses that could save on expensive visits to specialists and emergency rooms later. The company is able to make this change because it pays for the health-care benefits, not insurance companies. With 115,000 U.S. employees, IBM spends about $1.3 billion a year on healthcare so it is highly motivated to launch new healthcare initiatives.

Approximately 50% of Americans (133 million) have some form of chronic medical condition. Most of these people are not actually disabled, but they absorb a large amount of the country's healthcare resources. The most common chronic conditions are high blood pressure, arthritis, respiratory diseases like emphysema, and high cholesterol. The projections are that the number of people with chronic conditions will continue to increase. Most of the people in this category are between the ages of 18 and 64 -- in other words they are people who are working.

By encouraging employees to consult with their primary-care physicians IBM hopes to drive down costs over time. The company does not require primary-physician referrals for employees to see specialists. The combination of these factors -- no co-pay for primary care and no approvals for specialists plus payments of up to $300 a year to employees for taking exercise classes or enrolling their children in online weight-monitoring programs to curb obesity -- makes IBM a trend setter. The benefits will surely flow to both employees and shareholders.

Other IBM Happenings for the current period

Complete index of IBM Happenings

Healthcare, IBM November 1, 2009 05:53 PM

Monday, August 17, 2009

IBM Happenings: July 2009

The month of July was another busy one at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list of press releases here and an index for prior months here. In addition to the major focus on a "smarter planet", IBM is investing in society. The company's social performance is right up there with it's financial performance.

Right after the fourth of July, IBM issued its annual Corporate Responsibility Report, detailing the company's social performance results and strategies in the areas of governance, supply chain, environment, community engagements, employment policies and practices, and public policy. The 40-page report features IBM's Corporate Service Corps, a program IBM characterizes as a corporate version of the Peace Corps with the goal of developing a next generation wave of IBM leaders while at the same time addressing critical societal challenges in emerging markets. The company is integrating business and social strategies to make significant and lasting impacts in communities. For example, in the Sichuan province in China, the area stricken by a powerful earthquake last year, teams of IBMers engaged in the relief and recovery effort using their technology skills. The development of the skills also presents economic opportunities for IBM so the corporate citizenship goes hand in hand with business.

The report also outlines how IBM is minimizing its environmental impact by developing innovative technologies to conserve more energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reusing and recycling IT equipment to reduce product waste, and utilizing environmentally preferable materials in its products and processes.

The company report describes how it provides employees with skills training, health and wellness programs, and opportunities to gain global experience. IBM also supports healthcare reform and has been advocating "Patient-Centered Medical Home" (PCMH), a model based on the concept of comprehensive primary care. I am enthusiastic about this initiative because it offers the chance to replace today's poorly coordinated, acute-focused, episodic care with coordinated, proactive, preventive, acute, chronic, long-term and end-of-life care. This approach is fundamental to the transformation of the U.S. healthcare system. Many believe this can be best accomplished by strengthening primary care. The "medical home" is an enhanced primary-care model that provides comprehensive and timely care and emphasizes the central role of teamwork and engagement by those receiving care.

The full corporate responsibility report is at http://ww.ibm.com/responsibility/

Other IBM Happenings for the month

Healthcare, IBM, Public Policy August 17, 2009 06:39 PM

Saturday, July 11, 2009

IBM Happenings: June 2009

The month of June was another busy one at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list of press releases here and an index for prior months here. A major focus area in addition to a "smarter planet" is is Cloud Computing. IBM introduced the industry's first set of commercial cloud services and integrated products for the enterprise. This is an important and strategic move for the company. It reminds me of some disruptive times during my IBM career (hard to believe it began 42 years ago).

Disruption is usually associated with a technological shift but I have observed that the disruption is preceded by and accompanied by a "dissatisfier". We have seen this movie three times.

In the 1980's the dissatisfier was departments in enterprises that were dissatisfied with how long it took for the IT department to introduce new applications that addressed departmental needs. Departments started using spreadsheets on PC's, sometimes acquired by finding a way to bypass IT department approval. Then companies like Novell offered "server" PC's that allowed the spreadsheets to be centralized and shared by all the PC's. Departments sometimes did their own network wiring to install "local area networks". The IT department lost control. IBM was not the director of this movie and concentrated on defending the mainframe turf instead of embracing the disruption. The company was in the audience.

The second movie was in the mid 1990's. It was called the the World Wide Web -- a breakthrough application of the Internet. The dissatisfier was that there were many thousands of physicists in the world who wanted to gain access to a huge amount of data being created from particle physics experiments at CERN in Switzerland. The data was created in many different formats and the people wanting to use the data had many different kinds of computers. Enter Tim Berners-Lee with a new document format called HTML and an Internet protocol called HTTP. The result was any computer with a "browser" that could read HTML could get the data they wanted including multi-media. It was a major disruptive change to how all things IT worked. IBM did not sit in the audience for this movie. While Microsoft and Netscape (illegally driven out of business by Microsoft) were fighting over who had the best browser, IBM was making major investments behind the scenes to insure that all of it's hardware and software supported the Internet. In 1996 Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, introduced the term "e-Business". The company developed a layer of middleware called Webshphere that allowed enterprises to link all their applications to the web. This movie made $billions. There is much more to the story than summarized in this short paragraph. Take a look at Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround by Lou Gerstner and Net Attitude by yours truly (now available to read free on the web).

The current movie is about Cloud Computing. IBM is planning for a repeat of the success it had with e-business. This time the dissatisfier is that IT applications have become too too costly and too difficult to use. A good example is Microsoft Office. I call it the "global IT tax". GE decided to confront this by going to cloud computing with Zoho.com. While Google, Zoho, Microsoft, Amazon and countless others are waging "cloud wars" over the consumer, IBM is behind the scenes again this time building a range of cloud offerings for the enterprise -- cloud tools for developers, public clouds to enable more efficient offerings for all of the enterprise's constituencies, private clouds to replace intranets, and research clouds for academia. The offerings announced in June are the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned for much more from IBM in the clouds.

Much as client-server computing and the Internet transformed how people interact with other people and with data, cloud computing will transform these things yet again. With every computer in the world connected to every other computer through various clouds the potential to deliver data and collaborate around it will dwarf today's capabilities and at a lower unit cost. The data.gov project that Vivek Kundra talked about at the Wired Conference may be a model followed by enterprises. The idea is that when something happens -- a transaction, a widget gets ordered or shipped or had a service issue or a patient sees a doctor or has a procedure, the data will be in the cloud for others (who are authorized) to see it on a real-time basis. This is going to be an exciting movie and we will all be able to watch it in the clouds. (See other stories on cloud computing here at patrickWeb).

Epilogue: IBM has received considerable recognition for leadership with the World Community Grid. The grid can run virtual chemistry experiments to determine which of the millions of small molecules can attach to the influenza virus and inhibit it from spreading. There is the potential to make the world a better place because of this project. If you want to donate your surplus computer time to some of the great causes IBM is working on, take a look at worldcommunitygrid.org. Also, see IBM Happenings for May for more on the influenza project.

Other IBM Happenings for the month

IBM, Internet Technology July 11, 2009 03:00 PM