Analytics and IBM

The catalyst for our current interest in Analytics is IBM Philippines. Early on, IBM realized the potential of the Philippines to become the Global Center for Smarter Analytics. Working fast in order to take advantage of the worldwide opportunity, IBM convinced CHED to develop a Smarter Analytics Education Roadmap. CHED did its part by coming out with the two CHED Memorandum Orders I discussed in previous columns.

Other government bodies (such as DOT, DOST, and DTI), big industry players, and various schools (such as UP, Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, AIM, and Asia Pacific College) supported IBM’s move. This month, a consortium of government, private sector, academic, media, and funding organizations will form ANALITIKA, a group that aims to make the country indeed the global center for Analytics.

IBM worldwide has been investing heavily in Analytics. Here is an excerpt from one of their reports:

“IBM has established the world’s deepest portfolio of Big Data and Analytics technology. Today, more than 400 IBM mathematicians and 6,000 industry solution business partners are helping clients use Big Data to transform their organizations.

“Additionally, IBM secured 1,500 Big Data and Analytics-related patents in 2013 alone, and continues to engage and build solutions and skills across a broad community of 1,000 university partnerships, 135,000 Big Data University enrollments, and a worldwide network of nine Analytic Solutions Centers.

“IBM has made a multi-billion dollar investment in Big Data and Analytics – $24 billion since 2005 thru both acquisitions and R&D – to extend its leadership position in the strategic market for business analytics.”

I was trying to understand why IBM Philippines has been at the forefront of the Analytics movement. Of course, I knew that the current president and country general manager of IBM Philippines, Mariels Almeda Winhoffer, had been with the main IBM office in the US and had seen the global potential for Analytics. Having Filipino roots, she also understandably looked at the Philippines as a possible global center. When IBM’s research confirmed the rich potential of our country to become such a center, she unhesitatingly led the way.

Not having a good eye or ear for business, I did not know exactly how IBM would profit from Analytics. I suddenly remembered, however, my experience in Bangkok when I won the SEAWRITE Award some years ago. Among the sponsors then was a wine company. I asked the sponsor why they were spending so much on writers.

“When people read what you write,” the sponsor said, “they cultivate their tastes and they start appreciating quality. Their quality of life will improve. They will start looking for things that suit their more discriminating tastes. Then they will look for our wine.”

I suspect that IBM thinks the same way. If the Philippines does become the global center for Analytics, a lot of Filipinos will become rich and the country itself will become rich. When they are rich enough, they will start buying the high-level services that IBM has to offer. (I could be wrong, but that reasoning makes perfect sense to me.)

I know that all business enterprises exist for the sake of profit. But that profit need not come at the expense of the quality of life of people. On the contrary, lifting the quality of our lives has an ultimate advantage for companies. The more educated our tastes, the more money we have, the more likely that we will look for sophisticated products, as sophisticated as those offered by IBM, BPI, SMC, Shell, Rustan’s, Unilab, and other companies involved in ANALITIKA.

I like the idea of money going up, rather than coming down the economic pyramid (the latter being the trickle-down effect that Pope Francis condemns). Inclusive growth is not unattainable. One of the ways to get that growth is through Analytics.

READER RESPONSE. Thank you to Nicasio Perez Lim Aquino, who posted in my Facebook page his own explanation of Analytics. I quote portions of his comment:

“Image processing is now a reality and, in fact, has significantly progressed in all imaging areas, such as medicine, pharmacy, chemistry, biology, astrophysics, meteorology, and geophysics. The avalanche of so many digitized images with minimal or even without human intervention is now a reality and that’s through the use of computers. This has resulted in a new area they call ‘pattern recognition’ that becomes increasingly necessary due to the vast number of images to be processed, such as object trajectory and other pertinent data. That’s where Analytics comes in.

“With every new instrument, space mission, and satellite photo, the archives of digital images are growing enormously in size. This imposes increasing needs for the development of automated pattern recognition software methods in application to these huge archives. Big Data and Analytics!”

WORLD THEATRE DAY: The International Theatre Institute Philippines joined the rest of the world in celebrating World Theatre Day. Among the events organized in the Philippines were an Arab Monodrama Festival (featuring plays from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Palestine, and Syria), a sarsuwela (derived from the Spanish zarzuela), a performance by the Earthsavers UNESCO Dream Center, a Medical Theatre production, and (ahem) two plays by me adapted for radio (Ms. Philippines and The Lovely Bienvenido N. Santos), still playing on DZRH Radyo Balintataw until Tuesday.