Mandelson and IBM Say Analytics Will Make A ‘Hell Of A Lot’ of Jobs

IBM has announced the creation of a new UK centre for business analytics which the company’s chairman says will help create a substantial number of new technology jobs – a strategy supported by business secretary Lord Mandelson.

IBM expects business analytics to be as big as the market for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and could be worth £1 billion in the UK by 2013, said IBM UK chief executive Brendon Riley at an event in IBM’s UK headquarters in London. The company believes analytics – including tools such as business intelligence and smart grids – will help to boost the services economy.

“It [business analytics] is the next big wave of value creation,” he said. “I think we are in a place where we have the business imperative combined with the technical capability to take applications to the next level. Our research estimates it will be bigger and more pivotal than ERP and that is a huge statement on its own”

IBM’s analytics strategy includes a range of technologies including smart metering and traffic management. Earlier this year, IBM said that it is partnering with companies such as Trafficmaster to develop technology to help motorists spend less time stuck in jams and to more accurately predict journey times.

As part of the wider strategy around business analytics, IBM is creating a network of research centres around the world including one in London. The company says that it could create around 400 jobs initially in the centre itself but could lead to job creation as more businesses adopt analytics technology. “Naturally we want the UK to be leader in this space. Up to 45 percent of jobs across the UK are knowledge jobs and this will be the next emerging area for knowledge workers in our industry,” he said.

Riley went on to praise the UK education environment which he said would turn out the kind of smart people required to make the potential of analytics real. “Analytics will require very smart people in order to deliver the smarter solutions and this plays to the natural advantage of the UK educational environment,” he said. “Putting it bluntly we are going to create a hell of a lot of UK jobs.”

Also speaking at the event, business secretary Lord Mandelson welcomed the creation of the new IBM analytics centre and the potential creation of more UK tech jobs but went onto admit that the government could be doing more to turn out a generation of skilled engineers and technical staff.

“We have been good at creating graduates in my view but slightly less good at the turning out the technician class that move to a higher class of qualification,” he said. “It has been a weakness, a gap in my view in Britain.”

According to Mandelson the government is planning to fill the gap in the number of highly qualified engineers and technical workers in the UK over the next two years. “We have already started to create 35,000 technicians who will operate at that higher class,” he said. “We also want to turn more of our massive research base in this country to more commercial applications.”

The business secretary also referenced the UK’s reputation for being good at developing new ideas but behind Asia and the US when it comes to turning those concepts into commercial products.

“How many times have you heard it said that we are very good at innovation but not so good at turning them into commercial products and services and I have been hammering on about this ever since I went to the DTI ten years ago,” he said. “And I am at it again.”

Mandelson said more companies need to estabilish links with Universities to help turn research and innovation to “commercially succesful activity”.