Any news about IBM Strategy? They are an expensive, elite group from McKinsey, Accenture, Booz etc strategy companies. Their consultants are big-ego rejects from those companies. Were they impacted in the cuts?
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The original poster meant IBM Strategy Consulting group, not IBM's overall strategy. @qed+15JUB0KM meant the same.
This is an old article (2010). The IBM VP Tim Ringo got into big time trouble when he said IBM would go down to 100k heads worldwide. If you say “outsourced to IBM India” instead of contract work, it sure looks like his prediction is coming true. IBM non-India workforce is heading toward 100k heads at warp speed.
https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/ibm-crowd-sourcing-could-see-employed-workforce-shrink-by-three-quarters/
@kjq+15JUB0KM – can you cite any sources for your claim or is it just speculation?
Yes, I've heard Power is 100% going along with all Storage Hardware!
I am under the alleged “IBM Strategy” division within GBS. You are correct that there are a lot of wash-outs from other firms but mostly third tier consultancies, I only know of one ex MBB so these people are largely not real strategy consultants. The team has very little direction beyond working with existing GBS and GTS accounts to increase scope, which is work that the existing account partners should have been doing themselves. We have neither the client relationships nor the incentivized and trained staff who are able to execute a real strategy engagement. Plus we are pressured to offshore everything even with high rate strategy work, devaluing the brand and causing us to never gain traction. Accenture Strategy was very successful in bringing in high value strategy work and they still disbanded. As a real ex management consultant, it is unbelievably frustrating working with incompetent people, but also I am not paid or given incentives in line with real strategy consultants so until that changes, this will be a complete boondoggle and disbanded within a year. Already retention is horrible, including with executives.
The strategy is very easy to see.
- Drive 95% of the services off shore. (This is nothing more than a labor rate statement)
- Get out of the Commodity HW game (This is a storage and Power statement)
- Make sure the fortune 1000 sees zero change and hears IBM’s sales pitch about Hybrid cloud (this is a mainframe, Cognitive, AI, Cloud, and Redhat statement)
- Adopt a Redhat first go to market offering (this is a change the old guard out for a new younger cheaper employee statement)
What difference does it make. You can have the best strategy in the world, but unless you're willing to make the hard decisions and the actual investments to bring it to fruition, it's worthless. Re-classifying legacy hardware/software/services revenue as the new strategic stuff doesn't count and shuffling existing headcount around on paper isn't new investment. May as well just eliminate the strategy group since IBM will never actually implement anything they come up with.