IBM Lends Smarts to the Integration of Spatial Information within the Enterprise

As a leading integrator and provider of information technology, IBM has been using and promoting geospatial technologies for decades. Their recent efforts with the Smarter Planet concept speaks to the need for greater efficiently in our cities and the deployment of more intelligent systems for a more sustainable planet. V1 editor Matt Ball spoke with Michael Karasick, Vice President, Technical and Business Strategy, IBM Software Group, about IBM’s relationship with Esri, and the role of GIS for a smarter planet.

V1: As your first Esri User Conference, what are your impressions?

Karasick: What’s impressive to me is the pervasiveness of the technology, because it’s being embedded everywhere. What IBM does well is understand the needs of our customers and provide infrastructure (hardware, software and industry solutions) to help problem solve. One of the reasons that we’re working so closely with Esri is that they’re creating a geospatial fabric that is very complementary to what we do. They are very focused on spatial information, and we’re very focused on enterprise operation, yet they both meet in the middle in things like Maintenance, Repair and Operation (MRO).

Smarter Planet is about the improvement of the world, so there’s a lovely meet point where we decided that we could do more. That’s one of the reasons that there’s such a strong IBM presence, with 40 employees here in our booth. There is a fairly deep integration in terms of how our customers use the “where” and “what” to address enterprise resource planning or asset management.

V1: Does geospatial fit within these tools for visualization and communication?

Karasick: It’s at a lower level than that, and I’ll give you a specific example with our IBM Maximo asset management software. The city of San Francisco is using analytics (Cognos), Esri ArcGIS Server and Maximo to manage 110 miles of water mains and maintenance service people. They have a collection of activities around water, including billing and maintenance.

Understanding for example why they have lots of failures in an area, and getting the maintenance engineers to that area to do what they have to do, are all about spatial queries. Much of this happens in an enterprise fabric in terms of workflow. Any one of these enterprise operations have a set of services that are used to implement them, whether they are about data, about people or about the physical world. These pieces fit together very nicely.

We’ve seen fits and starts within the industry, but over the past few years we’re seeing a lot of enterprise customers move rather quickly to the notion of integrating spatial information into their enterprise. We see a lot of it in terms of utilities that are using Maximo and Maximo Spatial. On the analytics side, we’re seeing use of the BI Engine to understand temporal trends in terms of asset quality or labor needs.

Smarter Planet solutions are about connections of the physical world into the virtual world with the kind of operations that make sense. Typically there’s information from the real world with some kind of enterprise backbone, repositories, events, analysis, actions and business processes. These break down nicely into a layer cake.

V1: Are there specific areas of implementation of the Smarter Planet idea that are leading the way right now?

Karasick: We’re seeing a lot of smart water activities, with sensors hooked into the water system to talk about water flow and to understand leakage, and maintenance, and to relate the physical assets that they have to maintenance records. That’s very much an MRO application where Maximo fits in. There’s very much of a need to tie spatial queries into what they do.

A lot of these automated systems are going to trigger events, such as if water pressure is too low, with the need to send out a crew, you need to know where the crew’s are. It’s really about enterprise business processes with a spatial component, with the advance of sensors, a lot of back-end data, and the opportunity to do predictive analytics. Once you have all this information together, the thing that excites our customers a lot is using the joint capabilities of the company to analyze things spatially.

One of our customers talked to me about using analytics to understand why a particular part of the city had a lot more failures than another part of the city. They weren’t able to ask the questions until they were able to analyze failure trends. They saw a lot more water pipe corrosion in one part of the city, and discovered a much higher level of acidity in the soil. That’s a good example of how you can bring analytics together with asset management and the ability to do spatial correlation analysis.

It’s a lovely thing, and we’ll see more of it. One of the reasons that I’m here is that there has been much more activity between the two companies (Esri and IBM), and the trend is growing with the types of companies that we both interact with.

V1: What types of applications are you enabling through this partnership?

Karasick: There’s a maturity curve as people understand where geospatial fits into the enterprise. Where we are right now is the tactical information for pipes, telephone poles, and highways. We understand what those are, and that they have a physical component, an enterprise component, and a compliance component with records of maintenance. Bringing these together is very natural.

What we’re beginning to see more of is some next-generation thinking in terms of modeling and simulation. We have done some work around the modeling of watersheds, such as Galway Bay in Ireland and the Hudson River in the East Coast of the United States. These projects are about the deployment of sensors and the monitoring of events such as pollution plumes, fish concentrations, and other things. You end up blurring the lines between modeling and simulation with the ability to know where things are, and to model the different strata of the physical environment.

The other thing that is happening, because a lot of these companies that we’re dealing with are public utilities, is that there’s a face inside and outside the company. Increasingly as geospatial becomes more a part of how companies run themselves, and how large public utilities and governments run themselves, it’s very natural for them to provide services to customers and the citizenry. For instance, the EPA in Ireland has an application called SPLASH that is hooked into their overall bay management system that talks about how nice the beaches are in terms of water quality.

V1: Do you see the move to more transparency and openness as part of this trend?

Karasick: I was at a few e-government conferences recently, and we talked about openness and transparency, but we talked more about a different trend than geospatial, which is the increasing use of social networking. What’s happening is fairly simple. If you and I are going to work together, what social networking does is to provide a medium to interact around assets that are often both virtual and physical – a broken water main, or a dirty beach on the Gulf. The use of social networking technologies facilitates conversations around the physical world.

I applaud Jack Dangermond and the Esri team for getting that, and I’ll expect that they’ll get a lot of demands from customers to interact and communicate around features in the physical world. That’s what geography is about. In some sense Jack went back to his roots as a geographer in terms of talking about the world and interacting about the world through computers. We have a lot of social networking and interaction technologies at IBM too, so I expect again this complimentary story of ongoing and sensible integration between the two products. Both teams are quite excited about it.

V1: You’ve spent a good amount of time in Asia recently, and there they’re building whole cities from the ground up. For instance, in Korea they’re building cities around the uCity concept of a digital life. Are Smarter Planet initiatives being adopted there on a large scale?

Karasick: I lived in China for the past three years, and we’ve talked about the people side of intelligent cities such as Korea’s uCity. It’s an interesting Petri dish that we’ll all get to watch as it evolves. There’s a lot of physical IT infrastructure underneath these cities. It will be interesting to see how the quality of life is impacted by this idea of the digital life.

We’re working on a lot of smarter city initiatives in Asia. A city is a system of system, and when you break it down you don’t have a smarter city, you have smarter individual systems such as the transportation grid, water infrastructure and the electrical grid. We did work in Stockholm, Sweden around sensor-driven transportation. Recently we integrated people and automobiles so the city government has a real-time understanding of congestion from automobiles. Another system will be the electrical system, and we’ve been fairly active worldwide on smart grids and smart meters for people to monitor and adapt their usage.

Maybe it’s our DNA, but when we think of cities we look not so much about putting sensors into houses and adding telepresence, but about quantitative and qualitative ways for a city to do things better. One of the advantages of more intelligence is for the government to more efficiently allocate its resources, use them and manage them, and to have money left over for other things. We don’t direct the usage up front, our value is very much in the background, but we’re focused very much on these complex optimization problems.

We see the Smarter City concept as an evolutionary, and not a revolutionary thing. We look at the systems that comprise the city, and make each of those systems better. That’s a conversation that a lot of cities worldwide are interested in having. Governments are always interested in savings, so the discussion on optimizing what they do today is something that is very welcome.

We have discussions with companies that are looking at working with us to understand what best practices are in terms of integrating IT infrastructure with these physical infrastructure systems to make them better. I see with all of the focus that we’ve had together on working with utilities, this is just going to continue and accelerate because the value proposition is transparent.

Understanding and optimizing the physical and IT infrastructure, and business practices around that infrastructure, is really what Smarter City and Smarter Planet are about. It’s really a fun time to be in this space.

V1: A number of your projects seem to contain a remediation component, such as the sensor system in the Hudson River. Is much of this centered on setting past practices right as much as fixing broken practices?

Karasick: We move from reactive to proactive when we talk about planning. That’s why it’s exciting to have new cities that are interested in building out infrastructure and getting it right the first time, because it will amortize itself in a short period of time. When we look at Smart City engagements, most of them pay for themselves in a year and a half. The value proposition, and the ROI, is tremendous for our customers, and that’s not lost on any of these governments. They pay for themselves quickly, and the value to their citizenry is something that they see every day.

V1: In terms of simulation and visualization, is that what GIS lends to the whole Smarter City solution? Is 3D visualization a necessary component?

Karasick: This is one of the values of what I call separation of concerns. Esri has developed more physical simulation than we’ll ever know, unless it’s about semiconductors. We’ve been doing physical simulation for forty years at IBM, but for very tiny things. When we talk about the city, the notion of GIS-based analysis and simulation is what they deal with. So, our value is really about linking into the IT infrastructure, and if there are queries that are best answered using three-dimensional models, and the ability to put those operations into production, to manage the IT and physical systems on route to build, operate and manage those is what we do. Again, it’s a very nice juxtaposition of capabilities.

I was intrigued actually to see as much 3D GIS, which architects have been doing for a very long time. I went to Cornell twenty years ago, and they were doing visualization there. The technology has advanced so much that the technology is much more available to people. That’s really the story of GIS too as the servers and desktops and mobile devices become more capable, the technology reaches out to more people, and more people are doing more sophisticated things. That’s why I think we’re seeing a more broad-based interest in three dimensions, and the ability to answer questions is now more ubiquitous than it has been. The technology has been around for a long time, but it’s more pervasively accessible.

We’re responding to our customers needs to build more complex models, and asking us how to manage assets and physical systems, and we are helping them do that with products like Maximo and Cognos. It’s all about being in tune to what people are worried about today, and what they will be worried about tomorrow, and making sure we’ll be ready for them when they’re asking these questions.

There’s kind of a strategic evolution that allows us to see how things are coming together and evolving over time. One of the things we’re seeing is that e-Government is putting GIS into the hands of citizens even if they don’t know they’re doing GIS. When they download a map from Data.gov that might see tree coverage for a suburb of Washington, DC, and parks and schools, and also allow them to see the proximity to their work, and other details. The act of finding a house is GIS, but we don’t intimidate the public by calling it GIS.

We’re pushing down the ability to ask about the physical world into the fabric of government. That’s what Smarter Planet is about, understanding that IT has a lot to do with interacting with the physical world, and let’s use it to make this a better place to live.

One of the things that I was struck by here, and when I got more involved in the Smarter Planet campaign, is this public service notion that you don’t hear companies talk about. Our job is to make money for our shareholders, but there’s nothing wrong with doing it in a responsible and sustainable way. That’s what the GIS community has as a subtext, it’s all about understanding the world to make it better, and that’s what Smarter Planet is also about. We get to make money for our shareholders, and get to put IBM in places it has not been before, and at the same time we’re helping make things better on the planet.