Moe Abdula, vice-president of the Cloud Foundation Services Product Management at International Business Machines Corp.
Mumbai: Moe Abdula, vice-president of the Cloud Foundation Services Product Management at International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), also leads the business management teams responsible for prioritization of strategic investments.
In the past 15 years, Abdula has held many development and field roles at IBM Software, most recently as the director of the Tivoli Cloud and Mobility Strategy. In an email interview, Abdula—a keynote speaker at the two-day EmTech India 2016 event to be held in New Delhi on 18 March—spoke about IBM Watson’s success in sectors such as healthcare and how IBM focuses on helping companies participate in the new cloud-enabled digital world. Edited excerpts:
Please tell us how IBM is sharpening its focus on the cognitive power of Watson to usher in what you describe as the “cognitive” era?
For the past several years, the IT industry has been re-ordering, driven by simultaneous developments in data, analytics, cloud, mobile, social media, and Internet of Things (IoT). At IBM, we have been undertaking one of the most significant transformations in our history to lead these shifts and to help our clients take advantage of these new capabilities.
In doing so, we have learnt that while there are great benefits from applying the individual technologies, the greatest value comes from putting these capabilities together, in the context of an industry or profession. This is about business innovation, and it is a top priority for leaders everywhere—from CEOs to heads of state. You often hear them describe this as “becoming digital”.
We’ve also learnt that “digital” is not the destination, but the foundation for a new era of business. We call it Cognitive Business leveraging, the power of Watson. As with Smarter Planet, Cognitive Business speaks to IBM’s strategy and purpose. It is a powerful and urgent idea, grounded in real science and extensive applications in business and society.
To take the journey—to become a cognitive bank, a cognitive retailer, a cognitive hospital, to build a cognitive supply chain—leaders capitalize on all the work they’ve done to deploy cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security. They can take these investments to the next level—drawing on the breadth and depth of the entire IBM company—by developing a cognitive strategy.
What does it involve?
This means determining what data you need; which experts will train the system; where you must build more human engagement; which products, services, processes and operations should be infused with cognition; and which parts of the 80% of unstructured data you most need to focus on to see your future. This is where IBM invested heavily in the Global Business Services cognitive practice and offering set.
Already a leader in analytics consulting, IBM has launched the industry’s first cognitive consulting practice, with hundreds of analytics experts—supported by 2,000 specialists, drawing on IBM’s collective experience of 50,000 analytics engagements, as well as partnerships with Apple, Facebook and others.
Can you provide specific examples that will demonstrate Watson’s success in sectors like healthcare?
Take the case of the Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok in Thailand—home to 580 beds and more than 30 specialty centres and a network that spans 16 countries and four continents with a total 1.1 million patients. It needed a way to give their oncologists access to world leading expertise without taking them away from patients to read and digest the latest information. They chose IBM Watson for Oncology, trained by the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
One of the attractive aspects of the solution is the fact that unlike doctors, IBM Watson is not bound by volume, memory, or format. Using the power of cognitive, Watson can understand, reason and learn. It can read millions of unstructured documents in seconds—digesting the latest information and making that available, in context to the doctors. In choosing IBM Watson for Oncology, Bumrungrad International Hospital’s oncologists gained access to an expert cognitive adviser that helps them to make more informed, personalized treatment decisions for its cancer patients. So, for the next female patient—wife, mother, daughter, aunt—that comes in with breast cancer, oncologists at Bumrungrad International Hospital can use IBM Watson to analyse relevant portions of the electronic medical record, including the family history, notes from prior office visits and test results, and then summarize and highlight aspects of her individual record and notes that are potentially significant to her cancer based on the expertise of oncologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and using IBM Watson for Oncology they are provided with confidence-ranked, evidence-based personalized treatment options for this woman.
What about India?
Consider the case of the Manipal Hospitals in Bangalore that has adopted Watson for Oncology. This engagement is the first time Watson is being deployed in India, and represents a huge technology boost for the country’s healthcare transformation efforts.
Manipal’s goal with Watson is to help doctors deliver quality, evidence-based care to each individual cancer patient they treat. Cancer care is complex, requiring an analysis of each patient’s unique medical history, the latest medical guidelines and research, and sometimes even genomic data. Medical information is doubling every two years and while this new knowledge is tremendously valuable, it’s also impossible for any single clinician to keep up with.
Using Watson’s cognitive computing power and natural language processing abilities, oncologists at Manipal using Watson for Oncology, which was trained by experts at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, will be able to quickly sift through massive volumes of data to help them identify evidence-based treatment plans.
Are companies doing enough to keep their products and services secure while moving things to the cloud?
Security is often central to any cloud adoption framework, but it is also one that touches many dimensions. When one mentions “security” many folks think about protection of data, access management and encryption as top of mind for “cloud”. Those areas certainly are the key and get a lot of coverage in discussions with clients when they choose their cloud solution partner. What we observe, however, is that companies are not yet doing enough to create a more holistic and complete plan that goes past security basics. For many companies, disaster recovery and compliance are, and should be, part of their security concerns. Proactive threat management is another. For many companies, maturing that is the key next step.
[“Source-Livemint”]
