Kathy Gibson at Fujitsu World Tour, Bryanston — Digital co-creation is a vital element in crafting human-centric solutions.
Craig Baty, vice-president: International, marketing, marketing group and senior director: digital business services at Fujitsu Japan, points out that every person now has access to vast amounts of computing power and communication ability.
“At Fujitsu we believe technology should be designed with people at the centre,” he says.
Of course, gainsayers will always believe that technology might cause an apocalypse, Baty says. “At Fujitsu we don’t believe this. Technology is being used to solve real human problems – water supply, healthcare, fitness or others.
“It is all about people creating the future, with people at the centre. And digital co-creation is about blending business expertise and people to create business solutions.”
Fujitsu recently worked with San Carlos Hospital on new solutions to aid in the treatment of mental illness.
“We harnessed big data, clinician advice and patient records to come up with a way of accurately predicting if someone is likely to have a mental disorder before they know it,” Baty explains.
The solution uses artificial intelligence that accesses data in medical records that can identify diagnoses and risk factors. It has a 95% accuracy rating.
“Technology will transform healthcare over the next few years,” Baty says. “But anything you think of can be transformed.”
Most people believe their industry will change fundamentally. “And the best way to survive transformation is to transform yourself,” Baty says.
A survey shows that 75% of business leaders believe their sectors will fundamentally change in the next five years, 52% believe their organisation will not even exist in their current form in five years.
But only 7% see themselves leading this transformation
Digital transformation requires three things: intelligence, connectivity and everything from the customer’s viewpoint.
The customer’s viewpoint is important, Baty says. “We talk about customer experiences, moving from the process to what it really means to the customer.”
Digital transformation consists of four key pillars, he adds.
The first is the Internet of Things (IoT), which can be used to solve real commercial problems. Baty cites the automotive manufacturing industry, which loses millions if a production line goes down.
“The loss of productivity and quality can cause even bigger losses. So if we can solve some of these problems using IoT why wouldn’t you do it?”
IoT is based on three things: hyperconnected business and Industry 4.0; realtime visibility and digital twins; and control and insight.
Fujitsu worked with INESA Group, a Chinese company that was challenged by productivity.
A Smart Factory pilot using Fujitsu Application Intelligent Dashboard increased productivity by 25% and profitability by 30%.
The second pillar is cloud and hybrid IT.
These are built on platform scale; agility; application programming interfaces (APIs); and balance and control.
A Finnish petrol retailer, S Group, used a solution that integrates retailer and operation applications with a customer mobile app to ease customers through traffic.
It has been downloaded by more than 600 00 customers, and the company has seen a great ramp-up of customers.
The third pillar for digital transformation is security.
“Utilities are at risk of hacks,” Baty says. “In fact, the number of hacks on utilities has increased 527%.”
Fujitsu works with Norsk Hydro, which generates hydro-electric electricity and suffers from many security hacks.
Fujitsu created a dedicated response team, and integrated physical security with PalmSecure. Now, security has become the foundation of the customer’s digital transformation.
Banks are also security targets, and PalmSecure has been used to help banks reduce the amount of fraud they experience.
“We take security very, very seriously,” Baty says.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next pillar. The three levels of AI are machine learning, deep learning and neural networks.
“Fujitsu is working on these three technologies very deeply,” Baty says. “We have the most patents in the world for AI; and we have a Deep Learning Unit.”
Some of the applications for AI, that Fujitsu is supplying, include vehicle recognition, people recognition and handwriting recognition.
In addition, anomaly detection is being used in a number of applications, Baty explains. “This is central to our global cloud security. We run hundreds of data centres around the world, and cannot afford to have a security breach.”
In other applications, domains for graph data can be used by social networks, supply chains, fintechs, biology, drug discovery, IoT and more. Supercomputers using AI can process this data and return results quicker than ever before.
“These four pillars – cloud, data and analytics, security, and AI – come together in connected services,” Baty says. “We can change transformational outcomes through decision-making high visibility, customer insights, protection from security threats and intelligent data analysis.”
