First of all, I hope everyone reading this blog and your families are keeping safe and staying healthy everywhere in the world.
The Novel Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has impacted China for just over two months now. We have a sizable team in this region and, similar to our clients and other organizations, we have been working tirelessly to ensure that our people are protected, that any impact to our work with our clients is mitigated and that our business continuity is well-managed.
While there has been significant progress in containing the situation across Greater China, it is evident that we have a long way to go before we return to any state that resembles full normality. And there is little doubt that the return to a regular working environment will be a “new normal,” different in many ways from the one we knew before the current situation.
During this extraordinary period, I have proudly witnessed IBMers and our IBM teams robustly pushing forward to continue addressing our clients’ mission-critical needs in China. When delivering professional services from their homes, from hotels in self-quarantine, and at our clients’ facilities where possible, our teams are facing very restrictive and difficult circumstances. The creativity and persistence with which the team has overcome these challenges has been nothing short of impressive. Here are just a few examples:
- The IBM team supported and elevated the service level for equipment of one of our electronics clients in over 100 different hospitals (including in the pandemic epicenter of Wuhan), requiring careful orchestration, delivery and management of personal protection equipment for team members.
- We sustained our 24/7 business application support services for the payment systems of a major commercial bank operating in Asia by skillfully adapting remote and onsite resource deployment from multiple existing and new locations.
- We significantly modified, but still successfully executed, the launch of a new enterprise-wide operations and management business/process/application/data platform for a large agricultural and animal husbandry firm in a concerted fashion across multiple major cities of China–despite severe and complex travel restrictions.
These represent just a small portion of our team’s selfless dedication and commitment to our clients and our business. Of course, by no means do I think that IBM is the only organization which is stepping up like this in China during this critical period. However, for me to personally be part of a team like this is immensely fulfilling.
IBM is one of the largest, if not the very largest, professional technology consulting services organizations in China. With over 80 years of presence in the market, IBM has played an essential role in helping our clients and their industries evolve and transform through multiple eras of challenge and opportunity. We provide backbone technology and mission-critical enterprise transformations for some of the largest banks in China and, therefore, in the world.
Using an agile, design-driven approach at record speed and quality, we helped a world-leading automotive manufacturer and brand envision and build an AI-infused smart mobility ecosystem business platform for China based on a modern hybrid multi-cloud architecture. We also partnered with a leading Chinese liquor producer to fundamentally transform its omnichannel distribution management business capability with a first-in-the-industry, end-to-end sales and marketing business platform. A large commercial financial institution pioneered with us to transform the forfaiting transaction management to drastically improve processing efficiency and information sharing based on next-generation process design and blockchain technology.
Underlying many of the rapidly growing high-technology manufacturing and shop-floor operations in China is IBM’s industry-leading manufacturing execution management capability. A China-based digital gaming industry world leader leverages IBM Cloud technology and services for its operational and architecture foundation for the majority of its overseas business. The above examples illustrate how privileged we have been to contribute to the continued development of China’s industry, business, and markets at this special time.
As we look at the current and future landscape for our clients, the immediate health-related situation should be viewed in tandem with prevailing trade interactions, as well as any ongoing changes to the macro-economic status of China and other nations around the world. We are already seeing major changes to the issues faced by our clients and the needs they have across short-, medium-, and long-term horizons.
Demand, sales, and channels for many industries have been severely curtailed. Value and supply chains have been pervasively disrupted. Constraints and pressures on costs, cashflow, working capital, and liquidity are unprecedented. Business continuity has become challenged even with the best of plans. New digital and virtual ways of working, and new culture have suddenly become crucial for both white- and blue-collar working environments and interactions that were historically much more in-person and office-based in nature.
It is clear that a new wave of digital transformation is needed to help our clients to securely navigate to the emerging new norm and cope with the constantly shifting reality that will stay fluid for multiple coming quarters. We are working closely with a number of our clients—as well as our IBM experts in China and globally—to refine our hypothesis on the business requirements for the immediate- and longer-term future.
Our initial perspective is that the requirements of our clients and their industries continue to be well-founded in several key elements of our vision of “smarter businesses” with Cognitive Enterprise as the framework:
- Market-making business platforms,
- Intelligent workflows, and
- Enterprise experience and humanity.
Of course, given the current confluence of impacts and uncertainties, we also see accelerated and heightened imperatives and necessities for specific aspects. For instance, there is more use of exponential technologies such as AI and intelligent/hyper-automation, IoT, blockchain, edge computing, and 5G, especially in the space of workflows, culture and talent reinvention. All of these will take digital technologies into the core of work. More comprehensive designs and tactics for business resilience and risk management, and more aggressive adoption of next-generation architectures to process data to applications through to infrastructure.
With our leadership role in the market and region, we feel a sense of purpose and mission to play our part in defining where our clients and their industries will head in China as they emerge through the different stages of the current COVID-19 situation. We will remain committed to this market, and we look forward to working with our clients to shape and realize their success for decades to come.
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