This story is from April 30, 2018

Older companies realising enormous power of data: IBM Asia-Pacific head

Older companies realising enormous power of data: IBM Asia-Pacific head
BENGALURU: Harriet Green was recently appointed the head of IBM’s Asia Pacific operations. Prior to this, she led several functions of the company’s cognitive computing platform Watson. She joined IBM in 2015 after successfully leading a global transformation and rebranding at leisure travel group Thomas Cook. Last year, Fast Company named Green among its 100 most creative people in business.
In an exclusive interaction with TOI, Green talks about the value data analytics is bringing, and the changing skill requirements.
How do you see the changes in the technology world?
We are probably at the start of a new era in tech because the huge amount of data being created and what people do with that data are defining both business and technology. As we talk with business leaders, the sort of things they are thinking about are, first, what is the expertise that their company has, and sometimes that is different from what they make.
So take a company like Cemex, which makes a large part of the world’s cement. As they began to look at their data, they began to realize their expertise was in the construction supply chain. If you are in insurance, the real expertise is risk management. Second, what is the data that you have? About 80% of the world’s data is not searchable. It belongs to the enterprises of the world. So what do they do with that data, how is that data valuable, how do they want to mine it and create new products/services.
The third issue is around the platforming decisions. Platform could mean your own IT kind of environment, how you link to other platforms and how you scale using platforms. And then finally, and perhaps most importantly, certainly for the CEOs that I am meeting in India, is about technology bringing a cultural change, and managing that, reskilling, upskilling. It’s important even in India where people are so change agile.

There was a feeling some five years ago that it is only the disruptors, startups, that can serve the needs of people. What is great is that many of the incumbents are now realizing they have enormous power and capability to help create better products and services with the data they have.
From what we’ve seen, traditional companies in India have been slow to adopt new-age technologies to analyse data to improve operations and tailor better products.
Let’s take a company like Titan who I think sells more watches in India than any other company and are now using AI (artificial intelligence), our Watson customer engagement solution, to understand the history of buying patterns, what a customer may do in the future, looking at all of their history of how, when, where they have purchased, is it online or in the store, how to make the store a better environment. They are really using information to help tailor behaviours of the future.
Has Titan given you any impact information?
Titan said it increased the number of purchases that had been made based on these tailored campaigns and it increased them online. Titan has multiple businesses which are unrelated, but the common element is fashion. Watches is big business, jewellery is bigger, they have eyeglasses. These are very different from each other and they run separately. They are trying to use the Watson platform to find synergies between them. A Titan customer makes on average 1.5 purchases a year, and their objective is to make them buy three times as many items annually, whether through the browser, their mobile device or in a Titan store.
These kinds of technologies have raised concerns around data privacy and transparency.
We see a major shift around how companies, particularly tech companies like our own, see their relationship and responsibility to data. It’s actually one of the reasons I joined IBM a couple of years ago. The major beneficiaries of the big network effect have been 4-5 companies. I thought it was very important that going forward there was transparency around data. As you know, IBM always believes it’s your data, the data of your enterprise. We don’t take the data and turn it into some huge knowledge graph that other clients or companies can benefit from. IBM does nothing with your data unless you explicitly allow us to.
There have been reports in recent times about major changes in your people/skill requirements. How are you dealing with that? What kind of skills are you looking for in India?
I think all of us have the responsibility to have the skills that the world needs. IBM overall, but particularly in India, provides a wide range of reskilling, upskilling capabilities that people either embrace from a voluntary perspective or which we help them do. When I came into Asia-Pacific to run the region, I had run other businesses at IBM but I was less experienced in the GTS (global technology services) business and so I took the training that we provide all of our teams to ensure that we are able to support clients transitioning to the cloud and transitioning their businesses. I needed to really understand what is cloud, what is as-a-service, what does AI or augmented intelligence mean to companies.
As client requirements shift around the globe, where they require a different type of outsourcing as they move to the cloud, where they need different services, we need to manage our employment pools around the globe. The skills right now that we are looking for include great selling and business skills – to make data and digitization relevant to clients. We need even greater technical expertise. We are looking for data scientists, architects, data analysts. We are training a new generation of cognitive engineers, because such engineers are not being trained in universities around the world.
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