IBM Integrates Service Management for Smart Cities and Smart Buildings

For the world to become smarter, smarter service management is required

Service Management in Action IBM Integrated Service Management provides smarter solutions and the expertise you need to design, build and manage a dynamic infrastructure that enables you to improve service, reduce cost and manage risk.

Integrated Service Management, as supported by IBM's leading portfolio of solutions and services, is much more than just a way to manage technological infrastructures; it offers the enhanced visibility, control and automation required to get best value from assets of all kinds, for organizations of all types and sizes, from small businesses to entire cities — thus creating positive change wherever that change is needed most. It can in this sense be described as the operating system of the smarter planet.

Implementing service management on a metropolitan scale

This value proposition applies increasingly as humans become increasingly urban. Consider that in 2007, for the first time in history, the majority of the world's population lived in cities. This trend is continuing, and by 2050, that ratio is expected to have increased from 51 percent to 70 percent.

Clearly, to deliver best results for this population—some 6.4 billion human beings —cities and buildings must be managed better than they are today. Citywide assets and processes must be governed more holistically, integrating such currently distinct areas as public safety, education, telecommunications, transportation, energy and utilities and healthcare via a shared, secure, efficient and cost-efficient platform of management.

How is it possible to effectively use this next-generation, comprehensive, integrated management of this type and scale? IBM can help. At Pulse 2010, as part of the Integrated Service Management rollout, IBM augmented its already-impressive service management solution portfolio with new offerings, targeting service management in new areas.

Two of these directly address the question of service management at a metropolitan level: Smarter Cities and Smarter Buildings.

Smart Cities: Get better value from centralized management

Cities, in many respects, can be seen as paralleling enterprise-class organizations in terms of the epic scale and complexity of their assets and processes. And where the enterprise seeks to maximize business value, the city seeks to maximize taxpayer value. The central question is: how can the vast infrastructure best be managed and utilized to meet the needs of citizens, in the most timely and cost-effective fashion?

And toward answering that question, cities require, at a basic level, the same essential approach as organizations. They will need enhanced Visibility to track in real time the way the infrastructure is performing against targets. They will need enhanced Control, to make adjustments quickly, accurately and cost-effectively. And for the fastest and most consistent response to everyday events, enhanced Automation can deliver impressive results by eliminating the need for relatively costly human oversight and management.

IBM's Integrated Service Management for Smart Cities solution offers exactly these benefits. Through the bundled IBM solutions that comprise it, cities can achieve quantifiable, rapid progress in some of the areas most directly relevant to the needs of their citizens. Among others:

Intelligent transportation systems
Intelligent utility networks
Sustainable business solutions and services
Energy efficient technologies and services
Advanced water management

How is this possible? Begin with the fact that today's cities are often managed in a fashion similar to today's technology domains within the enterprise: as separate silos, each operating separately, using separate tools, rather than holistically for the best overall outcome.

Integrated Service Management for Smart Cities represents a sea change to this approach. Rather than separate silos and separate tools, IBM Service Management for Smart Cities delivers a shared management framework designed to collect information, analyze it effectively, reflect emerging trends, track status and health levels of assets, and implement change swiftly and cost-efficiently. The city, in other words, is managed as a whole, and optimized holistically over time for its citizens, rather than as separate parts.

More specifically, Integrated Service Management for Smart Cities can be used to create a City Command Center—a central point of control via which the city can coordinate and optimize operations across all city departments. Guiding that control is an executive dashboard that reflects, in intuitive color-coded metrics, the performance of the city's assets/services performance and health in real time.

This is made possible through an integration framework that links information across what had been operationally-separate silos, sharing it wherever it is needed in order to drive positive change. Toward implementing that change, business rules based on proven best practices are also included, to assist optimization. Finally, collaboration among city managers is also facilitated through the use of included Lotus technologies that have long performed a similar function in the enterprise space.

Among other beneficial results:

Coordinated, optimized operations, rather than fragmented, ad hoc responses.
Effective crisis management, so that when disaster strikes, the city can save more lives more quickly and more cost-effectively.
Improved transparency for city planning, procurement and reporting —all driven by advanced, intelligent analytics that give cities the ability to set priorities, assess progress and share results with citizens.

Collectively, these benefits are so substantial, and so widespread, as to transform cities into smart cities—managed optimally and holistically, for enhanced taxpayer value at every point.

Smart Buildings: Intelligent, interconnected and instrumented

Of course, cities are comprised of buildings—and without smart building-level service management, is it really fair to characterize a city's service management as smart?

As one for-instance of building-level service management, consider the hot topic of energy efficiency. How well do buildings utilize energy? How much is wasted, and what is the impact on global warming as a result of the higher carbon footprint created by that waste?

According to The Climate Group, energy efficiency is an area where improved building-level service management can deliver truly impressive results. Estimates are that smart buildings, in which energy efficiency is managed intelligently, can reduce overall energy consumption, as well as carbon dioxide generation, by 50 to 70 percent —yet maintain all services and target service levels. That's a goal well worth achieving by anybody's standards.

But to achieve it, a new service management solution will be required to successfully merge building management and IT systems. This solution should be able to converge traditional IT services such as data, voice and video along with traditional facilities services such as security, cooling and lighting, and then manage them on a single platform for an enhanced overall outcome.

IBM's Integrated Service Management for Smart Buildings solution offers that and much more. This solution includes technologies drawn from IBM's deep portfolio of solutions to deliver comprehensive visibility, control and automation exactly where it is needed most, making buildings more strategic, more intelligent, more interconnected and more instrumented.

Data modeling and analytics tools, for instance, can be leveraged to suggest areas of possible change, then implement and orchestrate those changes as effectively as possible. IBM solutions in the Smart Buildings offering support that premise by allowing managers to create, edit and optimize the logic used by building systems to implement processes of all kinds.

Asset management tools drive superior value for assets of every class, at every stage in their lifecycles, by keeping building managers up-to-date about the asset status and their configurations. Armed with this information, they can then take action wherever and however it is needed, leading to many positive improvements. Asset lifespan, for instance, will be longer when assets are properly maintained, meaning capital investment can be deferred. And asset information drawn from one category—such as work orders—can be leveraged by others, such as procurement or budget forecasting. This comes as a result of the shared information repository and unified process engine all asset domains can leverage.

Data aggregation and warehousing is another major area of opportunity; once data has been collected and stored, it can then be leveraged for any necessary purpose in the future, such as generating new classes of performance reports that uncover emerging trends or reveal unexpected service links.

Toward converging overall management of currently separate domains, the Integrated Service Management for Smart Buildings solution also includes holistic monitoring tools. These can be used to track the status and performance of both IT assets and facilities assets, and then drive a rapid and cost-efficient response, all under a single pane of glass.

Furthermore, overall event management is also enhanced via tools that correlate dynamic changes in the infrastructure with their overall impact—essentially, abstracting out the technical details in favor of the holistic outcome, and making it easier to manage the building in order to improve that outcome.

The Venetian Resort: Smart service management yields smart buildings

As a specific example of how IBM's vision of building-wide Integrated Service Management can create positive, rapid change, consider the case of the Venetian Resort—the world's largest hotel, casino and resort complex.

Recently this resort was facing major challenges of a nature typical for city buildings, if on a far larger scale than the norm. Its diverse array of assets —spanning domains ranging from heating and cooling to elevator service to Wi-Fi Internet access —required continual, effective management in order to be sure they were performing up to specifications and meeting the needs of guests.

Today, the Venetian Resort uses IBM Maximo asset management tools to ensure these goals are met. Maximo Asset Manager, for instance, enables superior work order fulfillment, driving quick and effective change whenever a problem is reported. Routine and preventative maintenance to critical systems is also optimized through this solution, to minimize the odds customers will even experience a problem in the first place.

And in the future, the resort intends to integrate the Maximo Asset Management solution suite with its hotel service management system, and building management systems, for an even more direct, integrated, effective, and cost-effective approach.

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