HFS Highlight: IBM is embracing Open: Open Source, Open to Ideas, Open to Partnership, and Open to Innovate

What business and technology leaders should take away from IBM Think is less about technology innovation or new products but more about how IBM and its customers embrace leadership and cultural change in an “Open Age.”

At Think, IBM announced and promoted technological breakthroughs from a 2 nanometer integrated circuit to going “all in” on Hybrid Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI). While its technology advances are noteworthy, what resonated with HFS was how IBM customers achieved nearly a decade’s worth of technology-enabled cultural change during the past 12 months by providing their employees with data and insights to improve the customer experience.

In times of change, a leader should be brave and embrace ambiguity, and feed it data

At the virtual event, senior leaders from banks, life sciences, transportation, manufacturing, telecommunications, technology, and more shared stories about their firms’ unique journeys and where they made hard choices because of the global pandemic. Success came from a willingness to embrace ambiguity and feed it data. Audi showed how they used data and information to inform how they created a cross-platform experience for customers in the UK when car sales were in free fall and by doing so created net growth of new leads by over 50%.

These leaders took the challenge of COVID-19 and turned it into an opportunity to accelerate cultural changes. This included accepting the new realities of a distributed workforce, a need to address diversity in people, culture, and skillsets, and admitting the need for sustainable climate strategies.

Use data to create new customer experiences by empowering the front-line employee

IBM’s customers shared how, over the past 12 months, they have embedded technology into how they do business and create new customer experiences. These were not stopgap, duct tape measures. These are intentional decisions made to benefit their business, employees, and customers post-pandemic.

Case and point, when IBM President Jim Whitehurst asked, “How do you continue to invest when [your market and the future of your company] is so ambiguous?” United’s CEO, Scott Kirby, replied, “[United] stopped all other investments, but we continued to invest in technology.” United bet that through technology modernization, the democratization of data would be essential to their effort to restructure the business and enable improved digital and customer experiences.

This way of thinking is in line with HFS’s vision of the OneOffice™ mindset. By investing in technology to improve the customer experience, United is promoting its employees in the front, middle, or back-office to make better decisions, apply timely insights to solve immediate problems, and embrace a culture of engagement-led innovation.

With the Cloud, the sky is the limit, but Data is your strategy

The Cloud is an essential part of the journey. Applying technologies like IBM’s Z-series servers and Red Hat Open Shift adds can support hybrid cloud plans. And enterprises need to be intentional about their cloud architecture to realize the power and advantage from their data.

Exhibit 1: OneOffice™ – It starts and ends with data. Your strategy is to refine it

Source:  HFS Research, 2021

The journey begins and ends with data. By adding automation, AI, and analytics into the workloads, business processes, and tools used by computers and people, enterprises can harness both the “silicon and the carbon,” which are value drivers for digitally native organizations.

The bottom line: Leadership and culture must be willing to embrace change to take full advantage of the promise of “Open.”

As we accelerate into 2021, technology modernization will be the focus of every company. The access to zettabytes of data and the ability to distribute this is more available than ever before. IBM’s Think event shared many insights into how they are offering solutions. From HFS’s point of view, how you refine Data is the real strategy to bring value to the business and customers.

As a leader, you have an obligation to be innovative and address issues for the company, the market, and the planet. Combining technology with access to data allows for enabling new solutions for the market while addressing diversity and climate change with shared purpose as a hyperconnected business. IBM continues to bring new technologies to market, but it’s the partnerships with clients which bring to life the myriad of potential and actual outcomes that can be achieved with the right strategy.