i View

Watson and IBM i Data—Knowledge Necessary

Posted on May 16, 2017 by David Gillman

There is a lot of confusion as to what companies can do with IBM Watson.  At least Watson is architected so that any system can access it by processing via program calls over the Internet. Programmers need only to communicate input and receive output to make use of Watson-based analytics.

That is the main message you hear from IBM, but it is only part of the story. 

Watson is not a magic box which mystically does whatever you tell it to do. Someone needs to create procedures and analytical models that produce a result from a future input. It is not much different than creating a formula in an Excel cell that uses the value in a second cell in a calculation. In this example, Watson is equivalent to the first cell—consuming the value in the second cell to create an output.  In operation, your program from IBM i supplies the value in the second cell so that Watson can process the formula.The missing key in the marketing is that someone needs to create the formula in the first place.

Certainly, the analysis is going to be done on a platform other than the IBM i, but for businesses with critical data on the i, knowledge of the existing database and the historical information are vital in making that data useful for creating analytic models in Watson.

Posted in Enterprise Software | Comments