IBM Customers Analyse Performance At Impact 2011

IBM has been showing how its Smarter Commerce initiative can help enterprises of all sizes offer a better service to their customers. While journalists were busy hearing about grander strategies at Impact 2011, IBM was quietly launching several products to support business decision-making.

The annual conference in Las Vegas was awash with new and updated products as IBM attempted to stretch its customers’ perceptions of WebSphere. It is no longer a mere portal but a nerve centre that helps a company to react in an agile and timely manner to changes in the business environment, IBM claimed.

Forewarned Is Forearmed

The underlying message at Impact 2011 is one of how enterprises can increase awareness of business conditions and speedily increase their markets. An example of this was how the latest upgrade to IBM client CSX transportation has brought results.

The CSX software taps into elements of the Smarter Commerce applications to accelerate the process of registering new supply chain partners and partner communities. IBM claims that this has resulted in reducing average times from two days to 10 minutes.

US Smarter Commerce customer, First Tennessee Bank reckons that it increased the success rate of its marketing campaigns by over three percent. This may not sound a lot but for a bank of First Tennessee’s size it meant that the return on investment amounted to 600 per cent.

At a customer panel presentation, Nationwide Insurance described how the company is transforming its business processes to boost efficiency. Tammy Craig, Nationwide’s vice president of IT, said, “With all data going through one central business rules management system, we have streamlined complex processes, allowing us to focus even greater attention on serving the needs of our customers.”

She explained that system performance is absolutely critical and admitted that this has to be addressed before, and not during, the roll out. Nationwide Insurance had a “dark year” during its implementation of the rules engine. Performance problems kept cropping up that could have been avoided if it had been taken into account at an earlier stage.

“We used to generate our analytics reports two or three times per week but we can now do this almost on demand – several times a day. We have an 80 percent improvement in converting data to information which allows our executives to make better-informed decisions more quickly,” she said.