Cognitive Systems: Cutting-Edge Tools for Disaster Management

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Cognitive Systems: Cutting-Edge Tools for Disaster ManagementTime and again, we have seen and read about many natural disasters that have caused great havoc in the world, killing thousands of people and destroying properties and livelihood.
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Despite the fact that the human race has made tremendous technological progress in various fields, predicting and preventing natural disasters is one area where we haven’t been able to surpass the supremacy of Nature. Despite the technological and scientific advancements in this field, and ground breaking developments in weather forecast techniques, disasters at many times cannot be accurately predicted.

Dark days for India
Any Indian won’t easily forget the destruction caused by the tsunami in Southern India which was triggered by a major earthquake in 2004 and the back-to-back floods in Uttarakhand and Kashmir in 2013 and 2104 respectively. Damages of these floods ranged from $7 billion to $15 billion, impacting more than 2 million Indians.

For those of us in the services industry whose mission is to keep organizations’ information technology operations always up and running, or rapidly recover when a disaster strikes, we have a new way of computing that did not exist five years ago – an evolved cognitive system called the IBM Watson.

According to a new study by IBM and Forbes Insights, cognitive computing is enabling a new class of products and services that sense, reason and learn about their users and the world around them.
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The Cognitive Relevance
Cognitive systems have advanced intuitive capabilities that are similar to humans. They can think, observe and direct a course of action based on facts. They have a capability to radically redefine everyday life and enable organizational transformation by engaging and interacting with the company’s stakeholders to learn and make more informed decisions. As of now, this technology is being used by industries - so far including Healthcare, Education, Retail, Commerce - and has potential to be used by the government and other critical industries.

As an example, using weather data and Twitter feeds insurance companies are able to use an application powered by Watson for real-time weather insights to alert clients about hazardous conditions, such as a hailstorm, and suggest alternate routes or shelter locations.

Airlines have the opportunity to combine real-time and historical data to reduce delays and optimize fuel consumption. Utility services could be able to better predict outages and respond more quickly when bad weather strikes.

IBM keeping the enterprise running with Cognitive
At IBM, we are investing in new capabilities to help clients move from reactive business continuity and disaster recovery planning to a cognitive and predictive resiliency program. The goal is to avoid the impact of a disaster before it occurs.
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Here are some ways that cognitive computing can help keep companies up and running during disasters:

Preempting Failures to avoid it
Predicting weather events with more accurate probability is only one of many tools in the field of preemptive failures. Cognitive systems can run analyses on different data sets, using correlation analysis and time-series analysis to predict failures. By mapping network service orders with past equipment failures, organizations can see which scenarios would most likely result in a failure and avoid a full-blown breakdown.

Analyze best practices
Consider two companies with state-of-the-art resiliency plans. In the same scenario, one company is experiencing outages while the other does not. What are they doing differently? The answer might not be obvious. It could be very minor variations in their respective technologies that make all the difference. A cognitive system can compare multiple variables across multiple companies to look for correlations that define the most successful practices.

Integrate the cognitive agent into technical support
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Every moment that a service system is down translates into lost revenue, decreased productivity and frustrated users. A cognitive agent can answer questions with precision to get the systems back online faster whenever there are technical issues. IBM Watson, for example, responds with an answer in less than a second reducing the time it takes to determine the problem by up to 37 percent.

Resiliency Communication as a Service
Traditional response plans and incident communications may have been acceptable 5 years ago, but not today. Pre-planning still needs to be done – but with a different focus, and engineered into a platform that enables teams to respond quickly, doing the right thing at the right time, and keeping leaders informed as the event progresses.

Rather than lagging behind a disruptive event and sending out-of-date status reports that can be hours old before they are read by the recipient, Resiliency Communication-as-a-Service lets organizations close the gap, and provide near instantaneous updates to decision makers. This improves the quality, accuracy and timeliness of updates enabling improved decision making, reducing the duration of the disruption and mitigating losses.

IBM RCaaS is a fully integrated platform that can receive and track status information not only from human response teams, but critical assets from the Internet of Things (internet connected appliances). In addition to tracking the actions of systems and devices that are part of your response process, it can also issue commands to internet connected devices – whether to unlock secured access points in the event of a fire, or automatically close loading bay doors or hurricane shutters when needed.

In an emergency, speed is essential. Including cognitive analytics in disaster recovery and business continuity plans helps to prioritize the best way to effectively allocate assets to notify customers, restore systems and services and assist employees.
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(The article is authored by Vikas Prasad, Associate Director at IBM Global Technology Services for India/South Asia.)