This continues a category of posts focused on Innovative Uses of Technology for Business Benefit. As I wrote in The Giant Crunching Sound, CIOs are crunching incumbent, utility technology spend and freeing up dollars for innovations.
First a caveat. This is a post about a technology vendor. The webcast I link to below has sales slides for IBM Global Services. I am not endorsing their capabilities - more how IBM internally has leveraged technology to create an innovative workplace environment.
I first saw an IBM presentation in 1996 on how they had re-engineered their employee travel expense processing. They had taken a very manual, paper based process around approvals, receipts, audits, reimbursements and automated it using fax, workflow, digital imaging and archiving and neural networks (for exception analysis). While those technologies seem ancient today and there are many packaged solutions today, 10 years ago, the innovative use of technology had helped reduce their travel accounting staff 80% from 1993 to 1995. "Innovation" used to squeeze their "utility" spend.
Recently, IBM presented its "On-Demand Workplace" at an Information Week conference I attended. It is interesting to see to see how IBM has evolved over the decade several similar employee focused applications covering collaboration to training to provisioning. IBM says it has realized over $ 680 m in annual savings. The slide below shows some of their "savings" areas.
What is innovative is the mesh of self-service, portal and other software and hardware which has been leveraged in creating this electronic workplace. In a lot of ways it brings together its global work force of 300,000 + employees, almost half of which are almost constantly mobile - their sales and consulting staff. The payback from that common cultural and communication tool is, of course, much harder to quantify.
