IBM - Business Intelligence Solution – New

Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Business Intelligence Solution – New

Nomination Title: Agile Champion (AC) Bot

Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, explaining the features, functions, benefits, and results to date of the nominated new or new-version product or service, OR a written essay of up to 650 words describing the same? (Choose one): An essay/case study of up to 650 words

ARE YOU AGILE DRIVEN? Are your flexible and adaptable enough to move into the new digital age of working? Many organizations and teams will need to have these two key elements to remain relevant, successful and essential. Agile methodology is key to successfully delivering this transformation... but, as with all new ways of working, it takes effort to teach, learn and apply and that is where our AC Bot is here to assist. IBM Finance and Operations, is strongly linked to the Agile mindset and has employed the Agile driven Accelerate Journey for many of its departments, achieving positive results, both internally and externally.

As part of the Accelerate Transformation, Agile Champions were designated to work with squads for a set period of time, helping them to increase their knowledge and overcome challenges. When this temporary Agile support was no longer available, the need continued and additional Agile support was evident.

With this in mind and as part of the organization initiated Innovation Bot Challenge, we realized the need for a 24-7 Agile advisor for squads. In turn, this prompted us to develop the idea of the Agile Champion Bot. As a cognitive solution, the AC Bot can be part of our lives and encourage all IBM employees to continue learning.

For the development of the Bot we leveraged the Cognitive platforms and AI solutions IBM offers. In addition, we received support from the BlueSeller Team, taking advantage of the web-based user friendly and rich client that uses different Watson Assistant environments known as Corpus Management Tool (CMT).

At its core, a bot is a simple computer program that automates a repetitive task. When used for chatting online, chatbot programs simulate human conversation. For example, if you write “Hello”, a bot might be programmed to automatically respond, “Hey! I hope you’re having a great day.”

\With the right infrastructure, we started to collect available information to train the AC Bot, using a basic Data ingestion method of questions and answers, classified as “Intents” and basic keywords to identify questions, known as “Entities“. The Bot recognizes the user questions and provides the most accurate answers according to its level of confidence, based on the information related to the specific topics. The question base began to expand exponentially as did the complexity of questions. We realized the need to include additional information on several topics related to Agile; thus, we added new learning to the Bot such as, Waterfall Project Management, Design Thinking, Lean, Six Sigma, Scrum, etc.

After several months, the Agile Champion Bot became a reality. We tested the functionality with various levels of knowledge, Champions from the IBM Agile Academy, Champions from the Accelerate Program, Q2C collaborators, current transformations and participants. We improved the Bot with additional types of questions to finally release it on September 2nd, 2019. We obtained over 200 users globally in the first month, answering more than 700 questions with a 90% response accuracy equating to 100 hours a month saved in reducing the individual user’s research time from 30 minutes to less than a minute. Our expectation is for those numbers to exponentially grow conservatively to 100K users in a year, generating potentially 3,000 hours of savings in research time. In addition, the AC Bot usage is continuously expanding and the Bot is now being considered to be included in the IBM Agile Academy curricula. This inclusion allows the AC Bot to provide additional support for the Agile influenced Accelerate Transformation Program. As a result, we can support extended employee engagement which, in turn, translates into a better customer experience.

Our AC Bot will continue to learn and grow. Its Cloud-Bluemix platform supports a Cognitive solution for machine learning, allowing the Bot to expand its knowledge and provide accurate answers. The potential for this product expansion is vast and scalable across IBM, delivering a delightful experience to its users!