The tools they require us to use just get worse and worse. We've lost 1000s of man years of information as we moved from one Wiki/Conferencing system to another with no conversion / no training. Now we end up in Box, which is just a dumping ground of crud.
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I got confirmation that management training started, which means that the notification is coming very soon! It also seems like it is not only CIO. Check the latest posts in this forum
"And from what I heard they are awful leaders."
They are very awful - and the fact that they're STILL co-CIOs tells you all you need to know: neither one has been able to step up and come out as a clear leader.
It's a joke.
Jeff and Fletcher were great CIOs who brought innovation, enhanced productivity and overall experience. Things started to go down the hill when KG took over. The split of CIO into two made things more complicated and bureaucratic. And from what I heard they are awful leaders.
Going to add my two cents here. We keep hearing from the same person who seems to be arguing that one of the last places in the company where innovation was still possible should be shuttered and everybody fired. Why would you wish for that?
Honestly, he sounds like the typical old-time IBM, who thinks that austerity and choosing mediocrity is the wise business choice, and that we had just better su-k it up. The reality is that no business has ever succeeded with such a bland and visionless strategy and we won't either. It always fails. Remember the definition of insanity?
I do agree the CIO has stopped innovating. However, this was a conscious decision by the people he supports, a self-inflicted wound. The CIO has doubled down on Yes-men, working for people who never met an idea they liked unless they came up with it first. And the ideas of these people are pure mediocrity. I do think the CIO is doomed, but it is doom because of the kind of thinking that our friend below epitomizes. Just a couple of years ago, it was so much more. What a waste. Stick a fork in it, this turkey is done.
You need to look no further than IBM’s SW division to see what writing is on the wall for CIO. IBM has abandoned the “not invented here” mantra, and SW division is being shrunk by at least 50% as IBM shops outside for Hybrid solutions. Just look at the last 7 major purchases by IBM. All are outside firms that IBM has bought at a premium, and all are replacing legacy products and personnel. The same is/will happen to CIO. IBM can’t afford to wait on CIO to make IBM efficient. They will buy good enough products from existing vendors, and outsource the implementation of these products in the name of efficiency. You may not like that answer, but IBM is all about driving down costs, and buying vs innovating has become the go to play. Every division has adopted a form of “drive costs out of IBM” (Consulting = automate repetitive processes via AI, SW = buy vs innovate, infrastructure = partner vs manufacture internally) CIO will be no exception and will adopt what works well for each division into their play book. Driving costs down is job 1 at Armonk right now
If IBM was smart, then it wouldn't accept any bids from Kyndryl.
If Kyndryl was smart, then it wouldn't make any bids for IBM.
IBM and GTS couldn't make it work under the same roof. It would only be a disaster to use Kyndryl to get back to "the way they once were". Those two firms need to do the opposite...run away from each other as quickly and as far apart as they can.
If you outsourced CIO, Kyndryl would most likely be the winning bid. The synergies and knowledge base are just too easy, and Kyndryl has learned how to be lean and mean as they have had to compete with the Indian body shops. I suspect IBM would make a give to get part of the terms thus reducing financial impacts to both companies.
Bullocks. IBM is still a huge corporation. The vast majority of those "off the shelf" apps are terrible - hard to use, poorly integrated with everything, and full of bad decisions that require employees to memorize a labyrinth of workarounds. You shouldn't have to take multiple online classes to use an employee directory. Almost all of the enterprise software is beyond terrible and results in a loss of productivity. Rather than just threaten and yell at employees to be more productive, the CIO used to actually make it more productive. Threatening never works, but tools that are easy to use and well integrated do.
Funny you think bringing in green dollars is the only value you can have. CIO used to protect losing green dollars and very well too. But what do Arvind and Thomas do? Sales continue to drop, green dollars under their leadership continue to decline, so all they do is cut, punish and threaten. With such short-term thinking it has helped them get the stock price up for their personal pay days when they cash out. But they are leaving you a broken company with suboptimal, low quality tools and a demoralized employee population that is just hanging out til something better comes along. Uh, great job?
No longer my problem. I do not envy what is going to happen to IBM next. It's so sad.
CIO is nothing but a waste of time and effort - they have nothing innovative any more, nor do they perform any useful function for the company; ALL the CIO employees including the two useless VPs could be outsourced to another company like Tata, Infosys, Accenture to manage the infrastructure and the applications to save a bundle. And no one would miss these people at all. It's not like any of them could be considered to be the goose that lays the golden eggs, it is quite the opposite in fact - they are a drain on the IBM company resources. It's about time Alvind and the Pipmunks did something about that.
Call a halt to the CIO scam and become the "IBM CIO party po---r" !
The employees won't like it, but further budget cuts for many internal departments are inevitable. IBM isn't the company it once was. It doesn't have the cash, it doesn't have the employees and it has a vastly shrinking product scope. A lot of the tools that it pioneered like Bluepages are now mainstream...they can be bought off the shelf just like any other COTS application. The CIO office is not a product development organization, and they don't bring in money. How much innovation and internal app development does the organization really need?
CIO management and the product owners who act on their behalf do not have the IBM employee's interest at heart. In the end, they just care about cost cutting. Our tools get worse over time.
But just a couple of years ago it was different. When I was in Fletcher Previn's team we had researchers who validated that tools could be used before letting them go live (vendor) - and provided detailed lists of fixes that had to be made first. Most of those researchers all left IBM. We had brilliant solutions such as Bluepages that they designed which made things better and even won awards.
Now everything is cost cutting; or put lipstick on a pig (visual design only). Tools are deployed that are beyond awful to use - there is no one left to do UAT even. And gaps in functionality that you could drive a truck through that just 3 years ago would have led to designing a bold and innovative solution - but today is buried, as the POs reject anything not within "scope" (cost cutting). User experience has dramatically declined and now all IBMers suffer.
CIO is a microcosm of what is wrong with IBM, where all innovation is squashed as "too expensive" (without even doing ROI first) and making a delightful user experience has been replaced with creating a bland w3 experience that does nothing useful. But the execs and their PO stooges ignore all of the data and do whatever they want to do, which is solely to cut costs even if it results in massive loss of employee productivity. After all since they no longer have people qualified to measure that loss, they can and do claim whatever they want! And no one left seems to care if it is all lies.
I left CIO 2 years ago; if you are still there, run for the sake of your career. I am so glad I left and so will you. Bean counters are fools; but those who work for them are the biggest fools of all.
I think the most important point is whatever but what really matters is more but(secks).
Like…lots of it.
One of the facts of life in our modern society is that a lot of our activity is utterly pointless. They do nothing except make work for people who would otherwise be sitting idle, and a lot of money is exchanged in the process.
Online collaborative tools are useful in some, but not all, environments. Much of the time, they are just another fancy piece of software that costs money to implement and maintain, and therefore occupies a big space in the CIO budget.
In my time, the big money items were Lotus Notes, SAP and Siebel. Are any of those still being used? I always looked at Box as just a cloud storage alternative to Dropbox. I know they advertise collaboration and stuff, but is the CIO really pushing that as one of its uses? I guess I'm showing my age, heh.
Mass Layoffs are the #1 gift to the IBM company from the CIO management !
They hire all the great workers and put them under pathetic, ruthless, egocentric and sadistic managers and then...it's transfer the jobs to India and off with everyone else's head. What a freakin' waste of good talent from the CIO leadership ?
It's as sick as sending people to the death camps during WWII.