Assignment IBM - Changing a corporate culture PDF

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Herbstsemester 21 bei Uwe Leimstoll und Christoph Pimmer...

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Practice Case*: Learning Point assignments 2 & 3 A company in transition IBM is transforming the way in which the company is operating. Changes are seen as a necessary response to increasingly dynamic markets and especially to IBM's move from hardware roots towards new areas like cloud computing and big data. This change also implies the move from traditional "command and control" management culture to more open, autonomous, risk-taking, ideating and innovating cultural practices. The envisioned cultural shift goes along with the transformation of the company's values. Both elements are conceived at IBM to be a main vehicle for knowledge management. Another aspect which is closely related to this endeavour is the company's 10 year old performance evaluation system. The computer-based program includes not only a yearly goal setting and goal evaluation module, but also a stack ranking element, through which employees are compared to each other. This measurement fosters internal competition and interferes with the envisioned values of co-operation, openness, and knowledge sharing. For years, IBM employees have been worried that the annual employee review could give them a red flag. Even if employees had previously received high ratings, they felt vulnerable of being cut. Since IBM is also trimming jobs in the traditional hardware areas while hiring in the new areas, the performance evaluation system has caused a lot of politics and angst among employees. You can find more company background information at the end of this document.

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Learning Point Assignment 2 and 3: TASKS Discussion and change of corporate values

Your names: Fabian Egger, Robin Roten

BM's CIO Ginni Rometty approaches you, the CKM (Chief knowledge manager), to elaborate a plan of how to best foster a discussion and change of the corporate culture. The beginning of this journey should be the facilitation of a systematic discussion of corporate values (fundamental believes – loyalty, trust, accountability) underlying constructs of corporate cultures (google). Concretely, she wants you to develop ideas and a plan regarding how to foster a debate on values within the company , and how to allow the co-development of a new set of values , involving and engaging as many employees as possible in the process. Make a sketch of your ideas, addressing the following specific questions and points:

Overview of your ideas in a nutshell We want to put teamwork and collaboration on the forefront of our corporate values. Company offices will have open spaces, co-working areas, whiteboards where people can share ideas with each other. We want to make the working environment attractive also for the eye to improve collaboration. Generate an idea funnel, where people can voice project or feature ideas that have to go through different check instances where they get filtered, accepted/rejected. Rewards will be given based on team contributions and overall effect the outcome has on the different teams and business units. Have different meeting vehicles where people can drop in and listen to the newest achievements of a department. What is the plan? How would you proceed? Describe different phases. •

Get rid of the performance evaluation metrics where employees get compared to their peers in the organization, communicate openly about the why (transitioning from an “old school” hardware producer to an innovative force in cloud computing and big data).

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One red flag in the performance evaluation will not mean termination of contract. There will be given more leeway, a dialog with the superior must take place to mitigate the next steps, so the employee even has a chance to “redeem” himself if necessary.

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Once these first steps are done (in order to show the management is seriously committed to changing things) the open discussion should with employees should start – a company survey to each employee should collect data for the as-is state and where employees would like to see the values shift to in the future (collaboration, collectiveness, connections branded as the 3 C’s for example or Ideate, Bring together and Make happen as for the new internal behind the acronym IBM. Something catchy helps :).

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Since big data is a core competency of IBM it shouldn’t be too hard to evaluate the collected data and find the most important areas and improvement proposals of employee s.

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The management can also narrow the focus of the proposed things and let the people vote in the end, what they want to happen.

What technologies/media can be used to support the process? What specific technological functions? How, and why are they relevant? •

AI powered knowledge sharing platform

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Internal survey tools

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Internal big data knowledge to crunch the data behind the survey

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Internal knowledge groups for that matter as well.

Who should be involved in activities? How can you motivate employees to participate in this process? We think employees will be intrinsically motivated once they see that something progresses with some of their pain points and that management is serious about getting them onboard and want their feedback.

Design a new performance evaluation process and system. A related aspect is that a new performance management system should be developed, which is in line with the company's cultural shift. Make concrete suggestions for the system. Overview of your idea:

Re-think: What would/ should be the main purpose of the new performance evaluation system? Think of what motivates knowledge workers and makes knowledge-intensive firms successful? Negate push factor: People are afraid of being fired because of one red flag in their performance evaluation, even as high-performers. We need to eliminate that factor so people won’t be afraid to take risks anymore and actually bring in their unconventional ideas to move the company forward. Improve pull factor: Let people bring in their own ideas for the performance evaluation, an area where they want to improve themselves because it interests them, they found a need for their role etc. Employees also need to have the opportunity to voice critiques or areas of improvement for other people involved during the process. This will also be marked down in the performance notes and help let the employee feel heard in his problems and might also provide additional improvements in other areas. What kind of performance goals should be documented? List of few areas/directions that you deem important. Who should determine these goals? •

Goals that are defined by the supervisor; those are measurable business goals with “hard facts”, eg. Improve sales of product x by 25%, customer cases cannot be rejected in more than 10% etc.

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Personal goals you can define yourself as a motivation; I as a product manager want to improve my skills in customer centric design because it interests me and I found out that I am still a bit lacking in that department, plus it also helps improve the product in the end.

Who should be involved in the evaluation /feedback process? The employee, the direct supervisor and people you work closely with in either projects or day to day operations, as they can best rate your performance and help you identify areas of improvement. Frequency: how often should performance feedback be provided? Every 6 months, from personal experience - we tend to forget the evaluation when it is only once a year and the goals that were agreed upon one year before might not even be accurate anymore since either the job or the requirements have already changed again. 6-month frequency helps with task and goal actuality and not forgetting it. What kind of technology can be used? An HR system where the employee has to initiate the process from his side. He can also invite people he works with the closest to evaluate him on his strengths and flaws as an input for the supervisor to consider. Comments have to be possible and everything can be saved and looked at by the employee and supervisor at any time for transparency reasons. The employee should also have to sign or confirm at the end of the process that the evaluation and discussion was made in good faith and that he agrees with how things were noted. How can you involve employees in the design of the performance management system, collecting their feedback and ideas? Employees should be involved in the requirements elicitation process as well as testing phases throughout the development of the system. Conditions: The time frame given for both projects is one year. The budget will be fixed after the first discussion with Rometty according to your suggestions . Remember that IBM does not want to implement this change top down within the functional silos, but aims at closely involving as many employees and line managers across diverse departments as possible. Format: Partner work (max two persons); or individual work

For the successful completion of this assignment you will receive two learning points. Submit your file in the respective area on Moodle.

Company background information

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International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American company headquartered in New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries. Nicknamed Big Blue, IBM is one of 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the world's largest employers, with (as of 2016) nearly 380,000 employees. IBM has a large and diverse portfolio of products and services. It's business is centred on hardware (e.g. microprocessors), middleware and software. The company also offers IT-outsourcing (with 40 data centers worldwide), hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. One of its most well-known products is Watson, a platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data. IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most patents generated by a business for 23 consecutive years. In the 1880s, technologies emerged that would ultimately form the core of what would become International Business Machines (IBM). On June 16, 1911, four companies were consolidated in New York State to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). In 1914, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. joined CTR as General Manager and was made President. During Watson's first four years, revenues more than doubled to $9 million and the company's operations expanded to Europe, South Figure 1 IBM Watson

America, Asia and Australia. "replaced CTR" with the more expansive title "International Business Machines". On April 7, 1964, IBM

announced the first computer system family, the IBM System/360.

In 1993, IBM posted a US$8 billion loss - at the time the biggest in American corporate history. Lou Gerstner was hired as CEO to turn the company around. In 2003 he initiated a project to redefine company values. Later in 2009, IBM's Blue Gene supercomputing program was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by U.S. President Barack Obama. In 2011, IBM gained worldwide attention for its artificial intelligence program Ginni Rometty

Watson, which was exhibited on Jeopardy! where it won against game-show

champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The current CEO and president is Ginni Rometty.

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