At IBM's Smarter Analytics event this week, clients and partners presented success stories about how organizations are driving business value out of big data, analytics, and IBM Watson technology.

Examples included:

– City of Dublin, Ireland using thousands of data points from local transportation and traffic signals to optimize public transit and deliver information to riders.

– Seton Healthcare mining through vast amounts of unstructured data captured in notes and dictation to get a more complete view of patients. Seton currently uses this information to construct programs that target treatments to the right patients with a goal of minimizing hospitalizations in the way that most efficiently optimizes costs with benefits. The ability to mine unstructured data gives a much more complete view of patients, including factors such as their support system, their ability to have transportation to and from appointments, and whether or not they have a primary care physician.

– WellPoint using Watson technology to improve real-time decision-making by mining through millions of pages of medical information while doctors and nurses are face-to-face with patients.

But, clients warned that as much as the technology is advancing, the biggest hurdles remained the internal ones. Clients stressed that they face a critical challenge in introducing, driving, and changing the organizational mindset to work in a new way that can take advantage of these great advances in technology. What did they suggest?

1) Executive sponsorship from the top (C-level)

2) Hiring or retraining for new roles like data scientists (schools like Syracuse are introducing and promoting new programs out of their iSchool, which can help with reskilling experienced talent from other areas)

3) Strong governance around the program

 

What is your organization doing in this area?