Drawing the Cognitive Enterprise Blueprint

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This week, at the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit, Fall 2017, we unveiled the Cognitive Enterprise Blueprint to showcase how IBM is approaching its transformation to a cognitive enterprise. In the Global Chief Data Office (GCDO), we have been focused on optimizing cognitive projects that are being infused across IBM business processes. We can now take these processes to our clients as examples of where and how they can begin to adopt cognition for their own enterprises.

The cognitive transformation occurs in four areas: technology, business processes and organizational considerations, which all begin and end with data.

Data leaders in every industry understand that cognitive computing is going to have an impact on the way they conduct business in the near future. Cognitive systems have four main attributes:

• They are able to learn their behavior through education
• They support forms of expression more natural for human interaction
• Their primary value is their expertise
• Their reasoning approach continues to evolve as they experience new information, new scenarios and new responses

But the question many of these leaders are beginning to ask is where do we infuse cognition, and how do we do it? With proven use cases stemming from the GCDO, IBM can help clients answer those questions in four key transformative areas.

Technology

Cognitive services provide the ability to see and contextualize across all data. Embedded in trust (from acquisition, to quality, to access, to security), these services are open by design. In the cloud era, hybrid cloud solutions encompassing public, private and on-prem, along with enterprise cloud container support, ensure the fastest and safest scaled data platform.

A Cognitive Data Platform that hosts a data lake serves as the backbone for AI processes. Convergence of data, previously siloed across the business, onto one platform provides cognitive projects a reliable source to work with. At IBM, that means easily pulling into Watson technology offerings such as IBM API Connect for IBM Cloud and Watson Knowledge Studio.

Business processes

All points where significant human judgment is exercised – that’s where we see an opportunity to infuse cognition. Enable your CDO processes to be cognitive – across all development, information and data governance, client and product processes. Across the enterprise—all business processes – supply chain, logistics, budget & finance, HR and employee related initiatives, procurement – present an opportunity to drive transformation and enable a cognitive business.

In IBM’s Global Chief Data Office, we are already providing support for our sellers through Client 360 and for IBM Systems through the Cognitive Supply Chain; both projects utilizing the potential of the Cognitive Enterprise Data Lake.

Organizational considerations

Organizations need to keep pace with cognitive technology by training existing employees on the right skills, and aligning them to the company’s data strategy. It is also imperative to actively recruit individuals with experience in data; an area where talent is scarce and competitive.

Beyond data experts, persons across the entire business will harness cognitive capabilities. App engineers, business analysts, and subject matter experts need to become familiar with the cognitive systems that will augment their roles.

All of this requires significant culture change. Be aware and get ahead of the significant change management and communication required to outline the future cognitive state.

Data

Data are the key to enabling a cognitive enterprise. The underlying factor in the previous three components of a cognitive enterprise, data must be governed, secure, accessible and applicable. Successful data management results in improved business results.

Data scientists currently spend nearly 80% of their time collecting and cleaning data [1]. The ability to complete this task with cognitive computing means data scientists have more time to uncover insights and deliver value.

Cognitive systems run on data; internal and external, structured and unstructured datasets must be utilized to their full potential. The result is a fully-function cognitive enterprise.

Moving forward

At an enterprise with the size and resources of IBM, we can explore opportunities to infuse cognition into every business process across every vertical.

We are committed to moving quickly and deploying a “fail fast, fail soft” strategy. In any setting, you cannot innovate without making mistakes. By constantly trying new methods, we can see what works and what doesn’t quickly; this enables us to reach our end goal with speed.

The journey to becoming a cognitive business is just beginning—and we are excited to be sharing this journey with our clients as we revolutionize the enterprise space.
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IBM Cognitive Enterprise Blueprint 2017

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2016/03/23/data-preparation-most-time-consuming-least-enjoyable-data-science-task-survey-says/#2a6c22d16f63