The Globally Integrated Enterprise

“The globally integrated enterprise means … you move work to the places with the right skills at the right price and with the right variety to perform the job. IT and telecom means you can move the work around. In the industrial era, people moved to the manufacturing facility. In the information age, work will move to the people who perform it.”

“The GIE is far more adaptive. It’s also being able to tap into people with different experiences, culture. We get a better global view of what customers want. Also it gives us resiliency. If there is a problem in one region of the world—such as swine flu, for example—we can temporarily move the work elsewhere thanks to standardized processes and tools.”

“Looking ahead, IBM will continue to integrate operations across its global processes including research and development, sales, business operations. Our focus will be on effectiveness, simplification and bringing the best and brightest experts to our clients—wherever they are.”

“The key is values. We have a brand, an image, and a personality. It doesn’t matter what an IBMer looks like, how they are dressed, and where they’re working—they have a clarity of what’s right and wrong. Second, we have a long-term view of the countries where we operate. We take a personal pride in thinking that we are a national asset in the country. We are viewed as a local company. And we understand the issues of our clients in their markets. We invest and create very strong local teams.”

“The China Global Delivery Centre opened in 1999 with one service line: application services. We have grown rapidly in the recent years to a size of 11,500+ people in six cities, offering a broad spectrum of services to our clients in Japan, the US, Europe and Asia. We are proud that we are part of the GIE. It shows to our clients that IBM has the globally integrated capabilities to deliver consistent and reliable services from where the experts are. It also offers some great opportunities for our local people to grow their skills and careers.”

“In Brazil, one challenge to being a GIE … is the marriage of local culture and common business practices. We spend a lot of time implementing them for the local business environment. We support 40 countries. Rather than just teaching Spanish, we do dialect training. People on the phone with Mexico speak with a Mexican accent and vocabulary. Not Colombian. Or Argentinean. The customers feel more comfortable.”

“One reason Australia was an early and avid adopter of the GIE was that it fits with the country’s national agenda and issues. It’s a large continent with a lot of natural resources and it does a lot of business with Asia Pacific (APAC). It has always been an outward-looking country, and a mixing pot of people from a lot of places. You can see that in the next few years we won’t have enough people. The GIE plays to these challenges. So IBM Australia saw GIE as an opportunity, not a threat. It may be disruptive and we had to overcome those aspects of it.”

“We have a technical support center, a help desk, in Queensland that provides technical support to IBM clients in APAC. It’s here because we needed people with a lot of language skills—five native Asian languages—and people with technical skills. There are a lot of Asians in that part of Australia. They come for university and stay. So it turned out that the Gold Coast was the best place for the center. The GIE forced us to be more innovative and to think about opportunities that would have washed over us. There are about 500 people there now, and it’s expanding.”

“The globally integrated enterprise is about people and growth—it’s an exciting time. Having the talent and skills to drive value creation globally for our clients, our company is the agenda for this generation of IBMers. I am often surprised and delighted how quickly global teams come together to solve problems and create a faster path forward.”

“I thought being a call center agent was a dead end job when I first worked for the BPO (business process outsourcing) industry. But as I moved from one role to another, I realized that to work for a globally integrated enterprise such as IBM was to work at the forefront of globalization. That means facing the challenge of supporting clients in several languages across different time zones. That means having the opportunity to work with colleagues from around the world. Attending conference calls with colleagues from Hungary, China, Australia, India and the US is all in a day’s work at IBM. It also means the chance to grow one’s career at the breakneck pace of globalization.”