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By Sara Jameson
IBM successes over the years have come by hiring and retaining great workers. They have managed to continually invest in research and development initiatives in the amount of $5 Billion per year on average. They create solutions not just products companies need and their customers are fiercely loyal as a result.
One of the vital lessons IBM has learned is that in order to survive for a long time organizations have to constantly transform themselves and they must get out ahead of the changes that are coming rather than reacting defensively to them. There is no aspect of a business where this lesson is more important than in the IT department. Chief information officers earn their keep by managing their operations efficiently, and effectively, driving ROI from all investments, while hiring and retaining smart staffers. But CIOs are even more valuable when they help create a commercial organism that’s capable of constantly renewing itself into what IBM has labelled - a smarter enterprise. Then, they’re playing the role of a transformational CIO.
This behavior is embodied in, according to IBM's smarter planet site, Jeanette Horan, IBM’s CIO who has a clear vision of what she wants to accomplish. “The CIO truly sees the whole company,” she says. “We touch every process inside IBM. Also, we’re a showcase for IBM’s technologies. We walk the talk.”
She’s focused on three spheres: IT transformation, which is achieving improvements in IT operations through bold strokes; business transformation, which is improving the integration of IT with the business; and work transformation, which is all about revolutionizing the way employees are provisioned with technology. She’s aligned with the Smarter Planet principles, using new technologies that make it possible to better monitor business activities, manage the company’s vast portfolio of assets and bring analytics to bear to optimize operations.
IBM’s 2011 global CIO study revealed that 83% of the 3,000 CIOs who were interviewed say they have visionary plans that include such initiatives as applying analytics to their businesses, shifting to cloud computing and enabling their employees to work more flexibly via mobile computing and communications.
Here’s how Horan sees the three transformational themes she is currently working on at IBM.
IT transformation: Turning IT into a shared service makes it possible to operate much more efficiently, via approaches such as data center consolidation, and makes it easier for IBM to broadly adopt cloud computing. One of the company’s first major cloud moves was to set up a development and test cloud, and, now, nearly all of product developer requests for server computers are handled that way. This has reduced server setup time from an average of five days to one hour and cut the number of physical servers that are needed. Other IBM clouds support HR, collaboration and data storage, and Horan is setting up a self-managed catalog of applications that will be available to IBM employees from the cloud.
Business transformation: The main goals here are to help the company expand rapidly in emerging markets and to enable the product and services business units to go to market in an integrated way. Blue Harmony, which is gradually being rolled out around the world, enables the company to pull together in a single system all the elements of proposals for clients (hardware, software and services) and track their progress all the way to fulfillment, invoicing and payment. IBM’s Blue Insight analytics cloud allows nearly 200,000 IBM employees to access business intelligence from more than 100 data warehouses. Analysis that used to take weeks or months can now be done in hours or minutes.
Work Transformation: For most of the history of the IT function in companies, employees have been forced to adapt to the technologies provided for them by the IT department. But that’s changing now. IBM increasingly is providing employees with the communications, collaboration and computing resources they want in the ways they want to consume them. Last fall, for instance, IBM launched Whirlwind, an internal mobile application store that’s populated with more than 500 applications. More than 28,000 IBMers who have company-provided BlackBerrys have registered for the service.
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