Case Studies

IBM’s digital transformation could not succeed without higher levels of employee engagement, and that meant it had to throw out its existing performance management system.

Organizations across the business spectrum are awakening to the transformative power of data and analytics. They are also coming to grips with the daunting difficulty of the task that lies before them. It's tough enough for many organizations to catalog and categorize the data at their disposal and devise the rules and processes for using it. It's even tougher to translate that data into tangible value. But it's not impossible, and many organizations, in both the private and public sectors, are learning how.

South Africa's Nedbank is a leader in its market — but to stay in that position, it needed to identify new ways to serve its existing business clientele as well as attract new customers. Its solution: Use the extensive transaction data the bank collects to help customers improve their service.

The Bank of England, one of the world's oldest and most influential central banks, has made analytics excellence a key pillar of its mission to promote economic stability within the United Kingdom. Like other central banks, the Bank has relied on data and analytics to formulate policy recommendations. But, since 2008 when it regained its status as a regulator, the Bank has begun using its access to new forms of data to increase its insights and forecasting abilities about the British economy.

Many major cities recognize the opportunity to improve urban life with data analytics, and are exploring how to use information technologies to develop smarter services and a more sustainable footprint. Amsterdam, which has been working toward becoming a ‰ÛÏsmart city‰Û for almost 7 years, offers insights into the complexities facing city managers who see the opportunity with data, but must collaborate with a diverse group of stakeholders to achieve their goals. The city's chief technology officer, Ger Baron, makes it clear that their efforts are still early days: ‰ÛÏI can give you the nice stories that we're doing great stuff with data and information, but we're very much at a starting point,‰Û he says.

GE has bet big on the Industrial Internet — the convergence of industrial machines, data, and the Internet. The company is putting sensors on gas turbines, jet engines, and other machines; connecting them to the cloud; and analyzing the resulting flow of data. The goal: identify ways to improve machine productivity and reliability. This MIT Sloan Management Review case study looks at how this traditional manufacturer is remaking itself into a modern digital business.

American health care is undergoing a data-driven transformation — and Intermountain Healthcare is leading the way. This MIT Sloan Management Review case study examines the data and analytics culture at Intermountain, a Utah-based company that runs 22 hospitals and 185 clinics. Data-driven decision making has improved patient outcomes in Intermountain's cardiovascular medicine, endocrinology, surgery, obstetrics and care processes — while saving millions of dollars in procurement and in its supply chain.