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Infosys Tries to Turn Autoworkers into Programmers

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Although most of Infosys’ charitable activities are, as would be expected, focused on India, the firm also has a few global programs plus more focused contributions and work in many of the other countries in which it operates. For example, it contributed to and provided logistical support to the New York City fire department after 9/11 and continues to support educational initiatives, such as New York City’s STEM Mentoring program and efforts by local governments that need help in responding to natural disasters. Recently it launched a new, very different type of program that draws specifically on some of Infosys’ unique strengths and is intended to form the foundation for a much broader initiative.

A Second Chance for Ex-Autoworkers

As I discussed in two 2011 blogs, Infosys, along with a number of other Indian and multinational IT service companies have developed world-class training programs to bring graduates from India’s uneven college system to a common base of competence. Every one of Infosys’ computer science recruits goes through a 23-week Boot Camp at its Mysore Development Center, now called the Narayana Murthy Centre of Excellence.

It is now bringing this time-tested program to the U.S. in an attempt to retrain unemployed workers for new, high-skill jobs while simultaneously helping to address a growing shortage of skilled computer scientists and programmers. In March 2012, it launched an 18-week “Software Boot Camp” to provide unemployed Detroit autoworkers with an education comparable to a BS in programming.

The idea to boost training and employment opportunities for Detroit-area workers was initially spawned in a discussion with the Office of the Science and Technology Policy in the Office of the President. Washington then put Infosys into contact with potential partners and generally stepped back to let these partners design and run the program. Among Infosys’s primary partners in this endeavor are:

  • Wayne County Community College (WCCC) which will provide the facilities, manage the program and provide programming instructors who, after learning the Infosys program, will deliver it themselves and ultimately train others to deliver it;
  • The Workforce Development Department, which identifies and selects candidates who have lost auto industry jobs; and
  • The Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, which recruits and works with potential employers and will run a job fair to help the graduates find jobs.

Infosys is funding the entire program (which will be free to students) and is using the same curricula, courseware, exams and instructors as in Mysore. However, its Indian and U.S. programs have a few important differences. For example:

  • The Mysore program is targeted at new college graduates that Infosys has already hired. The Detroit program is open to older, non-employees who, after graduation, will be able to take jobs with any employer (including Infosys, for any of its 13 U.S. development centers) from which they receive an offer.
  • All Mysore students have a BS college degree in a computer science or engineering-related discipline. The Detroit program will accept graduates and non-graduates, with all types of backgrounds, who pass an entry test designed to assess analytical and quantitative capabilities.
  • The Detroit program, which is targeted at older people who have work experience, has been reduced from Mysore’s 23 weeks to 18 by eliminating the “soft skills” component that help new recruits adapt to a work in a professional, corporate environment.
  • While Infosys runs the Mysore program itself, the Detroit program was designed and is managed in conjunction with partners.
  • Infosys instructors conduct the Mysore program. These instructors will come to the U.S. to teach the first 18-week program, while training WCCC Computer Science instructors (initially 3 instructors) to take over the teaching—initially with oversight of and guidance by Infosys instructors, and later on their own.

The Detroit program is an experiment that is intended to determine the applicability of the Infosys training program to older students (an average age of 41) with diverse backgrounds. Although Infosys declines to discuss the background of the current students until the course concludes, they are clearly not the relatively heterogeneous lot of new BS Engineering and Computer Science graduates that make up a traditional Mysore class.

The company acknowledges that these factors, combined with its goal of maximizing completion rates, may combine to limit some graduates’ employability as programmers. It does, however, expect that even those who may not get jobs as programmers will be qualified for IT administration and support roles.

Scaling the Initiative

Where will this program go in the future? This will depend largely on the success of the initial class plus the determinations of employers and as to whether changes are required. Some big questions include whether there should be minimum educational requirements (such as a two-year or a four-year degree), whether students should be required to have a STEM-related background and whether the program can be evolved into a scalable, self-sustaining program that can be delivered by a broad range of non-Infosys instructors across multiple locations.

There are, of course, also a number of more nuanced questions, such as the types of jobs for which graduates will be best suited and how to best tailor the curricula, courses and pedagogy to the needs of students and prospective employers. The answers to such questions must await completion and a formal evaluation of the first program, as well as the success of graduates in getting jobs, feedback from students, instructors and employers and, of course, of Infosys’s partners.

While these and many other decisions must await the completion of the first Detroit program, Infosys has already begun to plan to expand this program and to launch others. For example, it hopes that WCCC will be able to immediately scale to three—and longer term—four programs per year, each with about 100 students. It also hopes to apply this same model to other constituencies and other geographies. It is already outlining a program that will be tailored to the needs of returning veterans (probably in conjunction with the Veterans Administration) and has initiated conversations with colleges and universities in other areas, such as Boston and Northern Virginia.

Such programs have the potential of delivering huge value. They can, for example, help:

  • Individuals acquire high-value, real-world job skills in areas for which there is strong and growing demand;
  • Community colleges develop and deliver more business-aligned retaining programs;
  • Cities and towns convert unemployed workers into participants in the knowledge economy; and
  • Companies, across all industries, beef up their IT staffs with professionals with up-to-date, state-of-the-art skills that can deliver immediate business value.

The program can also help Infosys. Although the vast majority of the company’s previous U.S. hires have been experienced professionals, it is now beginning to hire fresh out-of-school (“freshers”) for its U.S. development centers. While Infosys will have to compete with other companies in hiring such people, the programs will provide an expanded recruiting pool of people trained in Infosys methodologies, some of whom may help fill the company’s 300 current U.S. openings.

The program will also provide a supply of talent to Infosys customers (albeit also to its competitors). Just as importantly, it has the potential of improving Infosys’s public image by demonstrating its commitment to training U.S. citizens to provide the type of services that have recently gone offshore.

Although it is too soon to know how the current or subsequent Infosys efforts will pan out, the concept shows great promise. While community colleges have long offered all types of career retaining program, many such programs have not been well suited to actual market needs, much less to the needs of specific employers. Many of those programs that have been targeted to demonstrable market needs have focused on highly company- or industry-specific skills.

The Infosys effort has the potential of combining the best of both worlds—the broad reach and multi-employer appeal of traditional community college programs, with the teaching of specific, real-world skills for which there is a proven business need. Just as importantly, Infosys is providing these colleges with valuable intellectual property in the form of curricula, training materials, exams and even instructors that have already been proven in the training of tens of thousands of people who have gone on to successful IT industry careers.

As I have written previously, this approach is exactly the type of bridge between community colleges and the private sector that is required to retrain America’s workers (and possibly, in the future, initially train some of America’s students) for the jobs of the future. (See, for example, my 2011 blog series on the Future of Community Colleges). One can only hope that the results show as much promise as the concept and that it sparks the creation of many similar programs—by Infosys and hundreds of other companies—in many different fields and in many different cities. It is, however, somewhat ironic that it has taken an Indian company to pioneer a program for which the U.S. has such a critical need.

Posted in Community/Other Colleges, Corporate Social Responsibility, Infosys, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Tomorrow’s Jobs Require Tomorrow’s Skills

Monday, November 14th, 2011

 

At the end of September, IBM’s Almaden Research Center sponsored a conference on the future of jobs, the skills required for these jobs and how colleges, private sector companies and governments can individually, and in partnership, prepare people for these jobs.

The conference, titled Regional Upward Spirals: The Co-Elevation of Future Technologies, Skills, Jobs and Quality-of-Life, attracted participants from each of these sectors and from a number of think tanks. All focused on themes surrounding:

  • The growing shortage of educated workers;
  • How technology is transforming jobs;
  • Skills required for the jobs of today and tomorrow;
  • The role and challenges of colleges and universities in preparing a new generation of knowledge workers;
  • The role of the private sector in educating, training and helping employees refresh existing and develop new skills;
  • The need for partnerships among private and public sectors, academia and non-profits in closing the nation’s “skills gap;” and
  • The need to equip policymakers with better tools to model quality-of-life improvements generation over generation in regions, as infrastructure, skills, jobs change together.

The U.S.’s Growing Skills Gap

IBM’s Chief Economist, Martin Flemming, kicked off the conference by putting the current recession into historical perspective and aligning it with economist Carlotta Perez’s Waves of Technology Change, postulating that the economy is now in the transition between the installation and deployment phases of telecommunications and IT—between the initial implementation of these technologies, toward their use in fundamentally transforming business processes and societal institutions. Although such transitions typically result in slower investment and growth, this effect is now being compounded by our attempt to emerge from the financial recession.

A representative from McKinsey Global Institute then honed into our current employment problems by outlining some of the key findings of the group’s recently published report, An Economy that Works, explaining, for example, the unprecedented toll this recession has taken on jobs. This toll is particularly steep among those in low-skill/low-pay and mid-skill/mid-pay jobs. However, the unemployment rate among college graduates is still relatively low (4.2% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report) and the number of college graduates with jobs has actually grown by more than 1 million over the last two years.

In fact, many companies are unable to find all the educated workers they need—at least those with the skills they require. Forty percent of companies have had job openings for six months that they have been unable to fill due to lack of the proper skills. This is particularly true for specialized technical skills in science, engineering, computer programming and other areas of IT.

This skills mismatch, is likely to get worse before it gets better. McKinsey estimates that if the economy does improve, employers will face a shortage of about 1.5 million workers with college degrees (especially STEM degrees) by 2020. At the other end of the education spectrum, there will be a surplus of almost 6 million workers without high school degrees.

Skills Requirements

Just what skills are employers looking for? Clearly, as has been discussed endlessly over the last decade, employers have a deep, apparently endless need for STEM skills. Silicon Valley, as we always hear, has been continually ratcheting up the salaries (not to speak of the benefits) it provides the most promising computer science graduates.

Companies including Dow Chemical and IBM are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing curricula, funding courses and sponsoring research projects and fellowships in areas including chemical engineering and business analysis, respectively. At the conference, McKinsey highlighted the need for math and analysis skills by projecting a need for almost 3 million people (including more than 150,000 highly-trained “data scientists”) to extract business insight from “big data”.

In its An Economy that Works report, McKinsey groups these and hundreds of other job opportunities into six primary segments of the U.S. economy that it claims, will account for 70-85 percent of the up to 22.5 million new jobs (assuming strong growth) the country will create over the rest of the decade: healthcare (by far the largest), business services, leisure and hospitality, construction, manufacturing and retail.

There is, however, a caveat to even these projections. As Irving Wladawsky-Berger discuses in his blog on the conference, University of California Berkeley professor John Zysman discussed the ways in which “the algorithmic revolution” (the ability to codify activities underlying services and embed them into software) is fundamentally transforming the nature of mid-skill services jobs. The componentization of continually higher-level services functions, for example, is already making it easier to automate and offshore these functions.

Meanwhile, new innovations, such as IBM’s “Watson” has the potential of bringing this algorithmic revolution up into specialized realms of qualitative research and even expert knowledge. One of its first uses, for example, is likely to be in medical diagnostics, such as where a doctor can input lists of symptoms, medical histories, and a broad range of other relevant information to identify possible illnesses and recommended treatments. This, as I discussed in a previous blog on Watson, is only the first step in transforming medicine and the nature of knowledge jobs across all domains, and in changing and upgrading the types of skills tomorrow’s knowledge workers will require to ensure long, engaging and rewarding careers.

Just what skills will be required? Although each industry, and each job within it will certainly require specific combinations of functional skills, another presenter, from the Institute for the Future, cited its report, Future Work Skills 2020 to posit ten more generalized, foundational skills that will be required of most knowledge workers:

  1. Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed;
  2. Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions;
  3. Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based;
  4. Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings;
  5. Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning;
  6. New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication;
  7. Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines.
  8. Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes;
  9. Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques; and
  10. Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence.

Meanwhile, in another IBM conference on Leadership being held the same week in New York, Tom Friedman set the skills bar even higher, claiming that “Everyone has to bring something extra, being average is no longer enough. . . Everyone is looking for employees that can do critical thinking and problem solving . . . just to get an interview.  What they are really looking for are people who can invent, re-invent and re-engineer their jobs while doing them.”

This leads to yet another change in the job market that will require even more skills of tomorrow’s knowledge workers—companies’ growing reliance on part-time, contract and freelance employees as an alternative to hiring full-time employees. This means that more and more of tomorrow’s knowledge workers will, whether they want to or not, have to run their own companies or partner with others to create small business services companies. Not only will they need the skills required to manage a business, they must also have the skills required to work independently. Most importantly, they will need the sills to continually market and sell themselves, their ideas and their unique skill sets.

This is a very tall order. What must schools do to help students develop these skills—both functional and foundational? Are today’s schools really capable of doing so? How can other institutions, including companies, foundations, non-profits and governments help? These and a number of related issues will be discussed in my November 27th blog.

Posted in IBM, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, STEM Careers, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Promoting Shared Value Creation Within and Across Companies

Sunday, October 16th, 2011

Many companies have donated to social causes for years. For the most part, however, these philanthropic activities were viewed as nice things to do or as ways of improving the company’s image as a member of a local community, rather than as an investment in the business. Recently, however, a growing number of companies have come to recognize that advancing social causes is not only good PR, it can also be good business. Well designed and executed social programs can provide “shared value”—delivering at least as much value to the donor corporation and its shareholders, as to the recipients.

This practice, which has been aptly dubbed “Creating Shared Value”, is already being adopted by a growing number of companies. Maximizing this value, however, is not easy. It is difficult to build commitment through all levels of the organization, develop a true Shared Value culture and, especially, maintain focus and commitment in good times—and even tougher in today’s challenging economy. Most companies, therefore, need help in making a convincing business case to their executives and their boards, getting buy-in, building commitment through all levels of their companies and in understanding the ways in which partnering with other organizations can multiply the value delivered to all parties.

The last week of September saw three separate forums in which leading Shared Value proponents have attempted to provide exactly this type of help by sharing their visions, their experiences and their best practices with other companies and institutions.

One example is a webinar sponsored by FSG, a non-profit social impact consulting firm whose Managing Director (Mark Kramer) joined with Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter to explain the concept of Creating Shared Value (CSV) in a January 2011 Harvard Business Review article. After FSG set the stage by briefly explaining the evolution of corporate philanthropy toward Shared Value Creation and by laying out its Ten Building Blocks, it introduced Corporate Social Responsibility executives from three companies, each of whom provided an overview of how they made the business case and built commitments for CSV within their own companies. For example:

  • Hewlett-Packard explained the need to align and continually reinforce vision, strategy, delivery and performance across all levels of the organization, from the board to branch executives and individual employees;
  • Intercontinental Hotels demonstrate how its four-pronged model for a Shared Value sustainability program gained commitment, not just from its own executives and employees, but also from its franchisees and its customers;
  • Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt showed how aligning its social commitment with its business objective (of “selling educational achievement”) and assisting its business leaders with the tactical requirements for managing such programs allowed it to maintain its program across the regimes of three CEOs in less than two years.

Although these and a number of other companies have certainly demonstrated commitments to Shared Value, as explained in previous blogs, I see two companies—IBM with its Smarter Planet initiative and General Electric with Ecomagination—as most embodying the ways in which companies can effectively integrate social value with their own business objectives.

IBM has been particularly active in both:

  • Explaining the metrics it uses to assess the benefits of its social and philanthropic activities and the need to continually demonstrate the strategic value these efforts deliver to IBM as a means of “ensuring sustained support for these programs within its own company”; and in
  • Evangelizing the importance of aligning business and social strategies and helping all types of for and not-for-profit organizations, academic institutions and governments work together to create mutual value.

In the last week of September, for example, IBM sponsored two forums to evangelize the value of and help other companies build their own programs—both individually and in concert with other organizations:

  • THINK: A Forum on the Future of Leadership brought panels of industry leaders together with up-and-coming leaders from government, business, academia and science to examine the structural changes that will affect all organizations in the coming decades and the ways in which these organizations can, jointly and independently, reinvent themselves to improve the world in which we will all live.
  • Regional Upward Spirals: The Co-Evolution of Future Technologies, Skills, Jobs and Quality of Life in which it convened leaders from leading institutions including think tanks (McKinsey Global Institute, Institute for the Future), universities (MIT, Berkeley and Michigan State), corporations (Boeing, IBM) non-profits (IEEE and CAEL) and regional technology clusters (Washington Economic Development Commission) to examine how technology will reshape the nature of learning and jobs, the skills that will be required in the new economy, the types of jobs that will be created (and those likely to face a shortage of qualified employees) and the opportunities for leaders in all segments to work together to create the jobs, the employees and the academic/industry clusters that will be capable of addressing the needs of tomorrow.

FSG and a couple of its clients, meanwhile, is already on the agenda for another webinar that will explain the ways in which numerous companies and organizations can work cooperatively to address societal needs—an approach they call Collective Impact (see FSG’s recent book, Do More than Give) and the Winter 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article). This approach, as it will discussed in a November 9 webinar, depends on each party applying a common set of measures to evaluate performance and track progress.

Forums, such as those recently sponsored by FSG and IBM, play critical roles in explaining the payoff—both corporate and social—and of providing guidelines for managing such initiatives. Hopefully, we will see many, many more by FSG, IBM and many other organizations, over the next couple years.

Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Hewlett-Packard, IBM | No Responses »
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Scaling Infosys’ Educational Programs

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

Infosys, as discussed in my September 11 blog, has developed one of the IT industry’s largest and most comprehensive talent development programs. Although the program was created I India, and is by far the most mature, multifaceted and far-reaching in India, the company is now bringing parts of the program to other countries in which it operates.

From India to the World

Infosys has, for example, implemented versions of its CampusConnect program (which help colleges develop and launch business-relevant curricula and courses) in other countries in which it has Delivery Centers. It is, for example, working with Malaysian university faculties to improve IT education and with Mexican faculties to develop an IT curriculum to make programs more industry-relevant.

Just this month, it entered into an agreement with Singapore Management University (SMU) to jointly develop content, case studies and learning labs for both Infosys employees and SMU undergraduate and graduate students. They also plan to conduct joint seminars and tutorials and collaborate on currently unspecified research and pedagogy projects.

Infosys, however, is focusing the vast majority of its Out-of-India efforts on China, the county in which it has already hired 3,500 employees, with plans for another 8,500 in three years. For example,it  opened a Development Center in Shanghai and an Education Center in Jiaxing. This new Education Center, which will eventually accommodate 3,000 students at a time, will generally replicate the company’s Mysore curricula and courses, but tailor them to the specific needs of Chinese recruits. More than 650 recruits have already completed the Center’s foundation training program and another 350 in process.

The company is also beginning to work with Chinese universities. It has, for example, launched a Chinese version of CampusConnect and is working closely with local governments to extend the program to more schools in other regions of the country.

Multi-Lateral in India

Infosys is also working to scale its education programs by partnering with third parties. These partners include:

  • Individual companies, such as Microsoft, which is now participating in SPARK; and
  • Non-profits, such as NASSCOM, where it is sharing best practices with the group’s Education Council, for deployment across India; and
  • Pan-national organizations, like UNESCO, to share learnings and identify best practices that can be applied across many different countries.

The company also forges more informal cross-border relationships. For example, it regularly invites industry bodies and faculty from other countries to visit Mysore. They have hosted a range of countries, from barely emerging (like Bhutan and Rwanda) and solidly industrializing countries (such as Thailand and Colombia) to learn and deploy capabilities in their own countries.

Applying Indian Learnings to Developed Countries

Cross-border learnings on employee development and most other business processes typically flow from more developed countries (which typically have the educational institutions to create and the corporations to test and develop best practices around these processes) to less developed countries.

Perhaps, however, it is about time for more such learnings to migrate in the other direction. Companies ranging from Proctor and Gamble and General Electric Medical Systems have developed products specifically for emerging countries that have since been migrated to developed countries. There are similar opportunities for migrating business models, such as Li & Fung’s supply chain practices and Bharti Airtel’s use of variable cost, virtual infrastructures.

On one hand, it may seem strange to suggest that countries like the U.S. and England—countries that virtually invented and still have some of the best colleges and corporate talent development and management practices in the world—could learn much from India. That country’s IT services sector, for example, is prospering only because the private sector was forced to develop capabilities that the public sector was not capable of providing.

But in many senses, developed countries are now facing some of the same challenges as developing countries. These include a sclerotic education-to-employment pipeline that does not seem capable either of:

  • Preparing students with the skills that will be required in an increasingly global knowledge economy, or of
  • Reskilling current workers who must learn totally new skills to qualify for new jobs in their current industries, much less those in new growth industries.

This is certainly not to suggest that emerging country companies have some type of inherent advantage over developed country companies, either in helping schools to graduate more employment-ready students or in proactively developing the skills that current workers will need for tomorrow’s jobs. After all, Western IT services companies such as IBM, HP and Accenture, were faced with many of the same challenges as their Indian counterparts in growing the Indian talent pool. These companies addressed their Indian needs in much the same way as did the Indian IT services firms. All of these companies–both Indian and Western–are now applying similar practices to develop their Chinese labor forces.

Some Western companies–especially IBM in universities and Microsoft in secondary schools—are at least as active in partnering with U.S. schools as Infosys is in partnering with Indian schools. It is, however, a shame that such actions are not ubiquitous, across not just the technology industry, but all industries.

Given the seemingly intractable challenges faced in reforming our education system and in addressing the worsening mismatch in the skills that students graduate with, versus those needed by employers, this country’s education system seems to need at least as much help from the private sector as do those in China and India. In fact, in some ways it needs even more, since U.S. and European students are increasingly turning away from the type of STEM educations that Indian and Chinese students crave.

Perhaps many more companies, across all industries and countries, have something to learn from the Indian IT services industry’s experience in educating, developing and managing talent.

Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Infosys, IT Industry Role in Education, STEM Careers, Universities and Grad Schools | No Responses »
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Lessons from Infosys’ Employee Development Program

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

While India certainly has a few world-class universities (especially in technology), its overall educational system is, to say the least, limited.

Despite these limitations, Indian and Western IT services firms have managed to build a million-person IT services industry that is the envy of the world—rapidly progressing from providing basic, low-cost services, to delivering not only world-class development capabilities, but also sophisticated business consulting and process reengineering skills.

How were these companies able to shape such a limited supply of human resources into a world-class talent development machine? By directly assisting engineering institutions and business schools and, especially, by taking over many of the educational tasks that are typically handled by educational institutions.

Although all of the major firms—both Indian and Western—are assuming similar roles, Infosys is clearly one of the leaders, both in how it partners with educational institutions and in its own employee development program.

Pre-Employment Education

Infosys’ employee development process begins well before it actually hires a person. In some cases, the process can track back to its corporate philanthropy programs, as with programs such as SPARK (one-day introductory experiences for high-school engineering students, hosted at Infosys development centers) and Catch Them Young (a two-week program in which 9th-grade students learn the basics of information technology). Through these programs, which have touched more than 320,000 students in the last 3 years, Infosys has also donated technology, including almost 1,000 PCs, to schools.

The company’s primary work with educators and students, however, focuses on colleges and universities. Its CampusConnect program, for example, helps Indian colleges develop and adapt courses and curricula that teach more “industry-relevant” skills. The company develops curricula, courseware and methodologies which are published on its CampusConnect portal. The program trains faculty to deliver these courses through activities including:

  • Bringing college student and faculty groups to Infosys centers for training and exposure to Infosys practices and technologies;
  • Funding train-the-trainer programs and two-to-three-month faculty sabbaticals on an Infosys campus; and
  • Sponsoring regional meetings and monthly Webinars to inform faculty of new developments and provide opportunities for them to communicate and establish communities among themselves.

Students who don’t have access to the program through their colleges and universities can access the CampusConnect portal themselves, where they can download and work through Infosys courses on their own. Since its launch in 2004, the program has worked with more than 6,500 faculty members in more than 500 colleges and universities, reaching more than 135,000 students.

Although the vast majority of the company’s campus outreach efforts are targeted at engineering institutions, it has smaller, more focused programs intended to reach those in other disciplines. B-school Connect, for example, is intended to help business schools create bridges between theory and actual business needs and particularly to show the critical roles that IT plays in management, such as by helping them create topics in business analysis. Project Genesis, meanwhile, is intended to help science, commerce and liberal arts majors develop analytical and communication skills required for careers in Business Process Outsourcing.

All of these university programs, not to speak of the company’s own in-house programs, also have a critical sub-theme and objective—to help students and employees develop confidence in their own abilities and to improve their ability to make contributions to their employers.

These campus programs are not specifically tuned to teaching skills that will benefit Infosys or to directly promote Infosys as an employer. This being said, however, they do provide visibility into the company and, through its engagement with institutions, helps the company attract promising students. They can also lead to internships, both domestically and internationally through the company’s InStep program. These internships often lead to full-time jobs.

The company, in fact, typically relies on its 500 CampusConnect partners for up to half its new recruits. These partner schools however, are primarily second- and third-tier colleges and universities. After all, the tier-one schools, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, with which we have become so familiar, don’t really need all that much help. Moreover, their graduates are more likely to go to graduate school, than they are to seek direct employment.

Learning the Infosys Way

Infosys begins its formal employee education process as soon as it hires a new graduate.

Each new engineer is enrolled in the company’s 23-week residential program (there is a separate, shorter program for new BPO recruits) at the company’s Mysore Development Center. All go through a basic software engineering course before being assigned to deep dives. Software engineers, for example, will typically focus on a particular application (particularly SAP, Oracle or Microsoft) or technology (Java, Mainframes, cloud, mobility and so forth). New business analysts, meanwhile, will go deep into a particular cross-industry domain (such as finance, human resources or procurement) while project managers focus on project management techniques and Infosys processes.

This, however, is only the first step in a career-long continuous education process. Roughly 95% of those who successfully complete the Mysore program are then assigned to specific groups where they begin to learn how to apply these skills to the needs of Infosys’ clients. Each employee gets regular reviews and options for different career paths. They are also required to take continuing education courses and meet defined certification criteria.

The company currently offers 1,500 such courses in each of the technologies and business domains on which the company focuses, plus a growing number of courses in soft skills, such as communications and presentations. But while most initial training focuses on technology and soft skills, they become increasingly exposed to iness-based courses, in areas such as business value and specific functional and industry processes, in their later years with the company.

In fact, each employee must meet all the milestones and complete all of the certifications required for their current roles before they can be considered eligible for a promotion. These promotions can be either vertical (more responsible positions in their current role) or lateral (such as from software engineering into consulting or technology architecture).

As expected, Infosys provides selected fast-track employees with special attention. Identified leaders are enrolled in the Infosys Leadership Institute, which provides highly customized assessment, personal development and mentoring programs. This program, however, covers only about 850 of the company’s 130,000 employees and is limited to three tiers of employees:

  • Tier One, who currently lead departments;
  • Tier Two, who are likely to lead departments in three to five years; and
  • Tier Three, who are likely to become Tier 2 employees in three to five years.

All employees, meanwhile, are encouraged to provide some contribution to India’s educational system. SPARK classes, for example, are taught by more than 10,000 Infosys volunteers in a given year. Volunteers also play key roles in Catch Them Young and other programs conducted at Infosys Development Centers. The company also helps employees who would like to make deeper commitments, as by paying 50 percent salary to those who dedicate their sabbaticals to teaching at educational institutions or working at non-profits.

As expected, the vast majority of Infosys’ efforts are dedicated directly to working with Indian schools and Indian employees. But, as I discuss in my next blog, it is expanding a number of these programs to other countries. It is also partnering with non-profit institutions and other companies to scale its programs, both in India and around the world.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Education System and Institutions, Infosys, IT Industry Role in Education, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | 1 Response »
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The ACM Computer Programming Competition: Lessons for America and from IBM

Sunday, August 28th, 2011

My previous blog, The United States’ Clogged Technology Education-to-Employment Pipeline, provided a number of examples of how U.S. students, from K-12, to college to grad schools), are falling behind their counterparts in other countries across virtually all segments of STEM education. Although these deficiencies are troubling in their own right, they only begin to suggest a much bigger, much more troubling problem for the U.S. economy.

The educational system is, after all, the primary pipeline through which corporations receive the steady flow of talent they need to keep America competitive in a global economy. And since this competitiveness will be based on innovation, this talent must be fluent in the language of innovation. STEM is that language.

Although I have spoken with many people and have read and written much on the challenges facing U.S. STEM education, I never really had a chance to see the manifestation of these challenges for myself. Therefore, I was happy to travel to Orlando Florida to learn about and see the world finals round of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

This blog briefly describes the contest and its outcome, and provides my view of the implications for the U.S. Its primary focus, however, is on corporate support of these competitions and on their role in supporting the recruitment activities of their sponsors—in this case, IBM:

  • Why, for example, has IBM sponsored and funded this competition for the last 15 years, and why it has committed to continuing to do so for at least the next 5 years;
  • What value does IBM get from this generosity and what is it doing to maximize the value it derives from it; and
  • What are the implications and opportunities for other tech vendors that hope to promote STEM education and improve their own chances of recruiting the most promising graduates?

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

The contest is a multi-stage competition that started with more than 300,000 students. It begins with dozens of local competitions, and progresses through six geographically-aligned regional competitions (this year, with 24,915 contestants from 2,070 universities and 88 countries). It culminates in a final competition that, this year, consisted of 315 students on 105 teams.

These teams compete not only with each other, but also against tight time constraints and limited resources (one computer and three calculators per team) in an attempt to solve eleven real-world problems. They must often deal with ambiguity, exercise judgment to assess when to submit an answer (to avoid penalties for incorrect submissions) and continually reassess their strategies to determine on which problems to focus their energies. Success, therefore, depends not only on speed and accuracy, but also on teamwork, resource prioritization and allocation, quick thinking, and adaptability.

The questions are designed with varying levels of difficulty, from a couple that require relatively moderate skills to a couple that would challenge many of the best, most experienced programmers in the world. In the end, after five hours of intense work, ten teams answered seven questions correctly, and two teams managed to answer eight, an impressive feat for college students, especially under the constraints imposed by the rules.

As has been the case in most years since the competition went international, this year’s winner’s circle was led by teams from Russia (four of the top ten teams) and China (two of the top ten, including 1st place Zhejiang University and 3rd place Tsinghua University). In fact, combined, these two countries represented half of the top 26 teams (7 for China and 6 for Russia), with two other perennially strong countries, Poland and the U.S., taking two spots apiece and another, Ukraine, capturing three.

U.S. schools, who typically make quite respectable showings, qualified 18 teams for the finals. One, North American regional champion University of Michigan Ann Arbor, took 2nd place in the world finals and three others (Carnegie-Mellon took 13th, MIT 32nd and Princeton 48th) in the top 58 (all of whom had at least 4 correct answers). The remaining 14, each correctly answering fewer than four questions, received Honorable Mentions.

As would be expected, men overwhelmingly dominated the competition, with women accounting for fewer than 10 of the 315 contestants. This year, however, a woman was part of the Zhejiang University championship team. (As I discussed in my previous blog, U.S. women, while expanding their inroads in science and especially medicine, are poorly represented in math, engineering and IT.)

Challenges for the U.S.

Although one must not try to read too much into the results of one competition, Russian and Chinese (and more broadly, Eastern European and East Asian) schools are traditionally among the winners. U.S. teams, meanwhile, typically do make quite respectable showings. Approximately 20 U.S. schools typically make it to the finals, and in eight of the last 15 years at least two U.S. universities have won medals (i.e., placed among the top 12). In fact, at least three U.S. teams medaled in four of the last 15 years, with one winning the championship and five placing second.

Respectable: yes. But as the results of this competition (not to speak of the educational statistics cited in my July 31 blog) make clear, companies that need access to the best talent must look well beyond U.S. citizens and U.S. schools. After all, non-U.S. universities, as is clear from the competition, already contain much of the world’s best programming talent. (Meanwhile, some of U.S. teams, including the Number 2 University of Michigan team, included students from other countries.) These non-U.S. students and schools promise to become even more competitive as Asian schools, in particular, continue to improve, attract more world-class professors and become more attractive destinations for the world’s most promising students.

Meanwhile, as discussed in my July 31 blog, U.S. students (with the notable exception of Asian-Americans) are moving away from STEM disciplines and U.S. universities now count on non-U.S. citizens for rapidly growing percentages of their undergraduate science and engineering classes–259,000 new undergraduate students in 2009/10 alone (not to speak of an absolute majority of their PhD candidates).

That creates a problem: The U.S. is producing fewer of its own world-class programmers and IT engineers. Meanwhile, U.S. companies are finding it increasingly difficult to bring world-class talent from other countries into the U.S. Where then will these companies find the talent they need to grow?

This brings us full-circle back to the ACM competitions, and specifically to IBM, which sponsors the competitions.

Opportunities for IBM

IBM has been sponsoring the ACM competition for the last 15 years and has just committed to extending this sponsorship for at least the next five years. Why does it devote so much money and so many of its people to this work? It hopes to:

  1. Recognize and spotlight STEM skills;
  2. Inspire more students to study and develop their problem-solving skills in these fields;
  3. Encourage and facilitate cross-cultural exchange among schools and students; and
  4. Identify some of the best STEM talent in the world, expose them to IBM and the types of problems they would work on at IBM and improve IBM’s ability to recruit these people.

IBM, as exemplified by its rapidly expanded focus on donating money, products and expertise to educational institutions, and as demonstrated by programs such as its Academic Initiative and its newly announced P-Tech high school partnership with New York City, is deeply committed to encouraging students and helping all levels of schools to improve STEM education.

But for all of its philanthropic efforts, IBM is also intent on reaping its fair share of the rewards from such efforts. It wants the best and brightest of these graduates to join IBM. This is more of a challenge than it may appear. True, IBM is clearly one of the leading and most diversified IT companies in the world. It is also consistently rated as one of the world’s top brands and one of the best companies for which to work. Still, it is generally less visible to students than are more consumer-facing brands, such as Microsoft and Google and does not offer the type of pre-IPO lure of companies such as Facebook and Twitter.

The ACM competition provides IBM with a unique opportunity to meet and to present itself to many of the most promising college-age programmers in the world. It is, therefore, no surprise that IBM leverages the competition to introduce itself to these students. It provides demonstrations of some of the company’s cutting-edge technologies and research, and populates the conference with a number of IBM employees who are alumni of the ACM competition and of some of the schools represented in the contest.

It has also set up a separate recruiting process, separate from but coordinated with the company’s primary recruiting efforts, to learn what interested contestants are looking for in their careers and to help identify how they can accomplish their goals at IBM. This year, the company went a big step beyond recruiting. In addition to monetary rewards (of up to $12,000 per team) from ACM, IBM, this year, made open job offers to the top 12 placing students—three members from each of the Top Four teams in the competition. The company will offer them jobs or internships in whichever IBM group (IBM Research, Software Group, etc.) and whichever country (subject to IBM operations in and government permissions) they choose.

IBM’s partnership with ACM provides yet another example of how a company can do well by doing good.

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Is “What’s Good for IBM, Good for America”?

Sunday, August 14th, 2011

In 1953, General Motors’ president Charles Wilson said “what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” As often the case, the somewhat misquoted version, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” is the phrase that became part of corporate (or perhaps anti-corporate) mythology. One could debate then, as it certainly was during the 2008 automotive bail-out hearings, whether or not Wilson was correct.

The night of August 4, however, provided something of a déjà vu moment. That night, I had the privilege of attending IBM CEO Sam Palmisano’s Centennial Lecture, a reflection on some of the primary lessons that IBM has learned over its first 100 years.

The overarching lesson was that corporations are expendable—success in one era does not ensure success in another. IBM’s ability to maintain its success (and right itself during the period in which not only its success, but its future, was imperiled) has taught him three primary lessons:

Lessons for IBM

  1. The importance of the “and” in R and D. First, fundamental research is critical and cannot be cut during tough economic times since, “if you fall behind, it becomes very tough to catch up.” Research, however, is only the starting point. It must be complemented with development and the “conversion of discovery into profits.” Moreover, the formulas for successful “R” and “D” are both continually changing. Today, for example, collaboration is becoming as critical as proprietary research. You must, therefore, continually “innovate how you innovate.”
  2. An organization must survive not only its failures, but its successes. Companies must get beyond an emotional attachment to what made them successful in the past. Business models and organizational models, as well as products, must be continually rethought and adapted to the requirements of a new era.
  3. An organization must learn to outlive a charismatic leader. It must distinguish between charisma and leadership; as well as focus on and heavily invest in both helping its employees learn and on developing its future leaders.

In sum, while an organization must remain committed to a core set of beliefs, it must not confuse business and organizational models with beliefs. To be sustainable, an organization must continually rethink and adapt its objectives, its models and its approaches. In today’s world, this evolution must depend as much on collaboration as on competition:

“The Wild West of competition needs to be complemented with far more collaboration across old boundaries. Across academic disciplines… and industries… and nations…and even between competitors.”

Lessons for the Country?

Palmisano’s lessons were clearly drawn from IBM’s own past, and are intended to guide its own future. Although he and IBM would certainly deny any intent to shape today’s political debate, he did acknowledge that “many enterprises—indeed, many countries”—are struggling with “an inability to get beyond an emotional attachment to the past…to what [really] made you successful.”

It was hard for me and a friend, with whom I continually exchanged glances and smiles as he talked, not to view these lessons in the context of our countries’ current problems:

  • The need to look beyond current problems to invest, not only in R+D, but also in infrastructure and people, for the long-term;
  • The need to look beyond models and practices that created past success, and adapt them to continually changing circumstances;
  • The need to move beyond the personalities of past and current leaders and to invest in educating and developing new leaders; and especially the need to
  • Move beyond fight-to-the-death competition and to cooperate in solving common problems.

Okay, perhaps I am reading WAY too much into what Palmisano actually said. But it doesn’t stop me from fully buying into what I thought I heard.

Posted in Business Trends, Economic and Political Forces, IBM, Innovation/Entrepeneur, IT Industry Trends, Political Forces, Societal Forces | No Responses »
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Maximizing IBM’s Philanthropic ROI

Sunday, June 26th, 2011

My June 12 blog examined the changing objectives of IBM’s Corporate Philanthropy programs and how the company is redefining its priorities to better align with the company’s business strategies. This blog looks at some of the ways the company is attempting to maximize and measure the returns of its charitable investments.

The Business Value of Social Investments

IBM, as I discussed in the previous blog, is increasing its social spending and aligning this spending around new priorities. Now that it has come to view these expenditures more as investments than as gifts, it is focusing growing effort both on maximizing and measuring the returns they generate—the returns both to society and to IBM and its stakeholders.

It is, for example, increasingly channeling these investments into defined programs that can be applied, replicated, and scaled worldwide. For example, as I explained in detail in my 2010 reports on IBM’s Academic Initiative and its Corporate Service Corps initiatives, it has:

  • Developed a formal, global program to help universities more easily and effectively partner with IBM to address their needs in areas including technology access and implementation, curriculum development and course design as well as to share best practices with other universities (while simultaneously increasing IBM’s involvement in cutting-edge research projects and identifying and building relationships with promising students); and
  • Created a structured, rapidly expanding program, modeled loosely on the Peace Corps, to help emerging countries, cities and communities identify and implement solutions to critical development and other societal problems (while simultaneously contributing to and reducing the cost of IBM’s executive development efforts and demonstrating the value of, and sometimes creating demand for the company’s Smarter Planet solutions).

IBM is even programitizing programs as individualized as employee community volunteer activities. Although employees are certainly free to (and can qualify for IBM matching funds) select the type of causes to which they will contribute their time and money, IBM’s On Demand Community program is creating a line of proven, Web-based management solutions that volunteers can deploy in schools and other not-for-profit organization and agencies.

Increasing Social Leverage

This, however, is only one example of IBM’s use of in-kind contributions. Although the ratio of in-kind to cash contributions has increased relatively modestly over the last five years (from an already large 2.8:1 in 2005 to 3.6:1 in 2009), its contributions of IBM’s technologies has grown from $64 million to more than $102 million. These contributions range from entry-level servers used in classrooms and on-line delivery to supercomputers for research organizations and a broad range of hardware and software used to manage the day-to-day operations of all types of educational and non-profit organizations. There has been a particularly rapid growth in the software given for universities to use in post-secondary classroom education through IBM’s aforementioned Academic Initiative.

Although services represent only 23% of the company’s total contributions, they have the potential of delivering disproportionately high levels of value. After all, while IBM certainly produces products, its primary value is in its people. They embody not only IBM’s expertise (in technology, business, science, mathematics and dozens of other disciplines), but also the company’s commitment to innovation and excellence.

Although most of the services that IBM donates are in the form of technical services (as in helping organizations evaluate their IT needs and implement appropriate solutions), a growing percentage will come from Web-based on-demand services, such as the On Demand Community management solutions mentioned in my previous blog, and its Small Business Toolkit, which entrepreneurs can use to learn and implement effective business practices. The range of such online service offerings will certainly increase as IBM expands its cloud service offerings and its Lotus family of collaboration and social networking tools.

The greatest value, however, promises to come from a growing number of programs that contribute professional services. These include management consulting services from the company’s Global Business Services group and the broad-based services provided through the company’s Corporate Service Corps, and more recently created Executive Service Corps programs. Then, of course, there are the less programmatic contributions, such as the contributions of IBM scientists and medical doctors to organizations including the National Academy of Sciences and a rapidly growing number of partnerships with universities. Examples include partnerships with the University of Missouri on a cloud-based genomic research solution and the City University of New York on electronic textbooks and an Analytics Center of Excellence.

But while IBM certainly created and manages many of its own philanthropic endeavors, it also understands that many specialized Non-Governmental (NGO) and Community-Based Organizations (CBO) are better suited to delivering many specialized and on-going services than is IBM, can better service the needs of remote communities and can more effectively scale programs that IBM has created. It, for example, relies on partners including Digital Opportunity Trust and CDC Development Solutions to organize its Corporate Service Corps engagements and is now working with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to expand the CSC model to facilitate participation by many other companies, international organizations and foundations. The company also partnered with the World Bank to create the Small Business Toolkit, which can entrepreneurs use to learn and implement effective business practices.

Assessing the Benefits

As of now, there are no generally accepted principles for precisely measuring either the social or the business benefits of corporate philanthropy. Although business consulting firms like McKinsey and BSG, and social consulting firms like FSG and BSR are certainly working on such measures, corporations currently use their own measures. IBM, for example, cites benefits including improvements in:

  • IBM’s brand, including frequent write-ups in business periodicals and books by thought leaders, such as Rosabeth Moss Kantor (in her 2009 book, SuperCorp;
  • Talent recruitment, morale and retention attributable to the opportunity to contribute to society and pride in working for a company that encourages, enables and is known for these contributions;
  • Entry into new, and expansion into nascent markets, such as Vietnam and Nigeria, in which IBM has conducted philanthropic programs;
  • Tuning and demonstrating the capabilities of IBM technologies to new needs, such as its cloud-based World Community Grid and its work with the open source Sahana disaster planning and recovery application; and even improvements in IBM’s
  • Share price, by attracting investments from the growing number of social investment funds (SIFs).

Sound a bit squishy? Perhaps, but each of these improvements is being measured with varying degrees of specificity. Although IBM does not subject proposed social contributions to a strict ROI justification, the company’s Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs organization does calculate estimated returns and reports them to the company’s Corporate Citizenship Steering Committee and Board of Directors.

IBM, for example, either directly collects or contracts for data across a range of areas. These include:

  • Brand: IBM collects information on all of the media coverage of its CSR programming and assesses the value of it from mainstream media coverage (i.e. Wall Street Journal feature on the Corporate Service Corps or Fast Company coverage of World Community Grid) It also collects data on other “free publicity” in social media and electronic media. This is extensive and easily measurable.
  • Talent: IBM uses its own metrics to gauge the value of its CSR programs in the retention of top talent and its impact on recruitment and retention of talent. One publicly available example is Harvard Business School professor Chris Marquis’s study of IBM’s Corporate Service Corps, which assessed the program’s impact on factors including employee skills development, employee commitment to IBM and impact on local partner organizations and communities.
  • Finance: IBM tracks the degree to which Socially Responsible Investment Funds increase or decrease their purchases of IBM’s stock based on its CSR performance and the degree to which independent rating entities, such as Ceres or Covalence (both of which rank IBM #1) rate IBM highly.
  • Technology: Since many of its programs involve the use of critical IBM technologies such as cloud, analytics, grid, voice, digital imaging, IBM can track both new patents and the ability to obtain intellectual property or value for its technology innovations in the marketplace.
  • Geography: Most companies contribute the lion’s share of their CSR investments in major markets and in areas where they have most of their employees or clients. IBM, on a percentage basis, is the largest contributor to so-called Growth Markets and is able to track the impact its investments on business opportunity and key relationships.

All combined, these 5 areas have relatively specific measurements that permit the company to assess the ROI of its CSR investments. The company, of course, continually modifies and improves these measures over time. Although IBM Vice President of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, Stan Litow, certainly acknowledges the subjectivity of some of these assessments, he insists that the exercise is necessary. After all, philanthropic programs must be sustained if they are to deliver long-term value. The only way to ensure sustained support for such programs, in bad economic times as well as good, is to demonstrate that they deliver strategic value to the organization.

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IBM’s Evolving Corporate Philanthropy Objectives

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

In two recent blogs, I discussed the growing trends by which companies are:

  • Integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Philanthropy initiatives into their business strategies; and
  • Migrating from passive philanthropic donations of cash, to active contributions of their products, and especially the expertise of their employees to the needs of their communities.

These companies increasingly recognize that reputations for social responsibility can burnish the company’s brand, attract new customers, aid in recruiting employees and improve employee commitment to the organization. Some companies use philanthropic activities to facilitate entry into new markets, improve economies in existing markets and even increase share prices. They also see this active involvement as delivering much greater and more sustainable benefits to the causes they support.

IBM is a case in point. This is the first in a series of two blogs that examine how IBM is rapidly evolving its corporate philanthropy program to align with the company’s business strategy. This blog assesses the company’s changing priorities and their linkages to some of its core business objectives. The second blog (scheduled for June 26), looks at how the company is expanding and measuring both the corporate and social returns of these programs.

Toward a Business-Aligned Philanthropy Strategy

IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, in which the company works with communities to improve everything from their water supply to their traffic flow, facilitates what IBM views as a growing “fusion” between its business and citizenship strategies. Its efforts to address societal issues such as the environment, community economic development, education, health and literacy, increasingly rely on “IBM’s most valuable resources, our technology and talent, to create innovative programs” to assist these communities.

This has not always been the case. Although IBM has always been a major contributor to social causes, back in the mid-1980s, it often subjectively allocated contributions to causes in communities in which IBM operated and had employees. 95% of these contributions were in cash.

While struggling to get the lumbering giant back on its feet, Lou Gerstner hired a new executive to restructure the company’s social initiatives. This executive, Stanley Litow, was charged with applying the company’s philanthropic resources to address the needs of society in a way that would simultaneously:

  • Advance IBM’s own business objectives; and
  • Maximize the value of IBM’s “social investments” through donations of the company’s technology and expertise, in addition to its cash.

These focuses were further refined under current CEO Sam Palmisano, who insisted on methodically aligning IBM’s community service efforts around the company’s business expertise and on applying IBM technology and expertise, in areas including cloud, analytics and security, to societal needs. He also required quantification of the value of these investments (the value to IBM, as well as to beneficiaries) and on working more effectively with partners to better leverage and scale IBM’s efforts. As of 2009, for example:

  • 25% of IBM’s investments were in growth markets compared with an average of 1% for other companies;
  • Almost 75% of these investments were aligned around education and employee development, with most of the remainder being spread across human services, environment, health and culture; and
  • 55% of investments were in the form of technology and another 23.3% in services, with cash accounting for less than 22% .

IBM has steadily increased the resources it donates to charitable causes from less than $150 million in 2005 to more than $185 million in 2009. While this includes the company’s Matching Grants and Community Grants programs, it does not include the $36 million individual IBMers contribute through the company’s Employee Charitable Contribution campaign or the close to 1 million hours of their own time that current and retired IBMers dedicate to social causes of their own choosing under IBM’s On Demand Community program. Valuing these hours at a modest $25 per hour translates into an additional $24 million.

IBM is also expanding its commitments to its social programs, focusing on building longer-term, more sustainable relationships with its causes and its partners as a means of maintaining continuity, ensuring meaningful knowledge transfer, and of achieving long-term and sustainable results.

Educating the Workforce of the Future

While the increase in overall funds that IBM allocates to corporate contributions has been gradual, the change in the composition of these contributions has been dramatic. Education, for, example, grew from 67.5% to 73.4% over the last five years, while the percentage donated to cultural causes has fallen by half, from $11.2 million to 4.7 million.

The allocation of these educational contributions has shifted much more dramatically than the overall sums. While more than 55% of IBM’s 2005 educational contributions went the K-12 in 2005, 67.7% now goes to higher education.

As I discuss in detail in my 2010 report on IBM’s Academic Initiative, these educational resources are being applied much more programmatically and in a way that generates greater returns—to IBM, the schools with which it works and to students—than did the company’s previous efforts. It contributes hardware and software to computer science labs; funds scholarships, internships and interdisciplinary Smarter Planet research projects; and contributes IBM talent to help universities tune curricula and teach classes. Meanwhile, its Global Citizen’s Portfolio provides a range of tools to help fund employee’s lifetime learning, encourage them to mentor other IBMers and even prepare for new careers in teaching, government or non-profit service.

Why is IBM placing such a focus on education in general and higher education in particular? First, there is a huge need. Education is the Number One-rated corporate philanthropic priority of CEOs in general, and of IT companies in particular. It is also cited as the single greatest need by community managers. Second, IBM, like many tech companies, is already struggling to find adequate numbers of people with the skills required for today’s jobs. It sees even greater talent shortages in the future—particularly for the type of “T-shaped” people (those with a broad understanding of multiple disciplines and skills, combined with deep skills in a specific field) that will be required to develop, market, implement and manage the type of Smarter Planet solutions on which IBM is betting its future.

IBM is working, first and foremost, to help universities educate adequate numbers of people with the skills that it will require in the future, while simultaneously identifying and forming relationships with the most promising of these students while they are still in school. IBM’s need for T-shaped people, however, goes well beyond its own direct needs. It is also working to ensure that such people are available to IBM partners and customers and that these people are familiar with (and ideally have favorable impressions of) IBM and its technologies.

Improving Life in IBM’s New Growth Markets

As I mentioned, there been a big shift in the geographic destination of IBM’s charitable contributions. In 2005, for example, almost 70% of IBM’s donations went to the U.S, with Europe, Japan and Canada accounting for much of the remainder. By 2009, 25% of these funds went to emerging and developing countries, with contributions to Asia Pacific and Latin America both more than tripling over the last five years.

Why the big shift to emerging countries? Three primary reasons. First, as great the needs of the developed world, those of poorer countries are even greater. Second, IBM is becoming much more global, with about two-thirds of its revenues now coming from overseas, and three-quarters of its employees now based overseas—with particularly rapid growth in emerging countries, especially India and China.

This leads to a third, more pragmatic reason. IBM, like most other large corporations, sees much of its future growth coming from these countries. While it is already established in some of these countries, it has little presence in many of the smaller countries and, even in those in which it is well-represented, has little exposure in second- and third-tier cities.

Contributions to these countries generates exposure for IBM in preparation of marketing efforts, gives IBM employees a better understanding of the needs of these areas and helps to build IBM’s bona fides as a corporate citizen of these countries. Meanwhile, programs including Corporate Service Corps, Executive Services Corps and Smarter City Challenge provide emerging country communities with pro bono consulting to address critical Smarter Planet-related needs. These engagements deliver direct and immediate benefit to these countries while simultaneously providing them with an idea of the even greater benefits that may be achieved though broader, paid engagements. The consultants, meanwhile, provide a very human face to the giant corporation.

IBM is clearly channeling its philanthropic activities more strategically than in the past, insisting that they deliver value both to their beneficiaries, and to IBM itself. But as the company increasingly views these contributions more as investments than as gifts, it is also insisting that every given dollar worth of contribution produce the greatest possible return. My June 26 blog examines how IBM is both amplifying and measuring the returns—both social and corporate—of these programs.

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Cisco’s Commitment to Smart+Connected Communities: Transforming Cisco from an Internet Plumber into a Solutions Architect

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

This is a summary of the report on “Cisco’s Commitment to Smart+Connected Communities”. For information on how to obtain the entire report, email the author, Tom Kucharvy, at TomK@Beyond-IT-Inc.com

Cisco is on a self-described mission to transform itself from what CEO John Chambers called a networking “plumber” into a trusted architectural adviser and provider of “platforms for innovation”. This requires a fundamental transformation in the company’s value-add, its sales model, the types of services it provides and, perhaps most challenging, in the type of partners the company recruits and in the ways it engages with them.

The company, as discussed in a series of my blogs beginning in May 2010, effectively began this journey by developing a solutions-based approach to promoting its video and other collaboration technologies, virtualization, and borderless networks—all by leveraging its core strength around the network as the underlying platform. It has since extended way beyond horizontal solutions by unveiling initiatives around a growing number of solutions-based “market adjacencies.” These adjacencies, which include healthcare, education, energy, transportation, sports, entertainment and public safety and security, are also being combined into more comprehensive and ambitious efforts such as its Smart+Connected Communities (S+CC) initiative, in which it provides the intelligent, integrated network solutions across multiple adjacencies to help cities drive economic, social and environmental sustainability and efficiently deliver 21st century services.

These efforts will serve as critical proof points of whether the company can indeed extend beyond the maturing and increasingly competitive market for switches and routers to become a globally recognized provider of solutions that improve businesses, societies and Cisco’s own bottom line.

Building the S+CC Value Proposition

Although Cisco has been providing tools for addressing specific, narrowly-defined industry initiatives for the last several years, its effort to pull all of these and other complementary point solutions into a comprehensive network-based, city-wide architectures began in 2008, when real estate developer Gale International selected Cisco as its networking partner in developing the intelligent infrastructure for a totally new city, the Songdo International Business District, which Gale was developing in South Korea.

New Songdo is the most expensive privately financed real estate project in history. It will be a green, LEED-certified community, designed from the ground up to emit one- third of the greenhouse gases of a typical city its size. It will also be one of the world’s first smart cities, with Internet-monitored and controlled traffic, water, power, transportation and public safety. Every wall socket and appliance will be connected to the IP network and every home and office will be able to monitor and orchestrate its own heat, air conditioning, lighting, appliances and energy usage. Each will also have its own Cisco TelePresence videoconferencing system—which Cisco claims will be the “killer portal”—though which all types of urban services (healthcare, education, safety, shopping and so forth) can be accessed.

As ambitious as New Songdo may sound, Gale and Cisco view it only as a starting point. Given the rapid growth in Asian urbanization, the duo plan to use New Songdo as a template from which they will build more than 20 new “instant cities” across Asia. Cisco will also apply the same platform to helping cities of all ages refresh their current infrastructures and enhance and automate the delivery of each individual service (from distance learning and health monitoring through energy management and security services) for which they have a need.

Although Cisco already has many of the infrastructure capabilities required for a platform on which to run and from which to deliver this broad range of services, its history as a box-pusher and plumber has hardly prepared it—much less give it the credibility—to effectively evangelize the vision of a world of vertical services, much less that of the architecture of the city of the future.

It began developing these capabilities gradually beginning with discrete initiatives, as around its Telepresence system and suite of collaboration tools, and then extended these efforts into discrete verticals, such as education and healthcare. As I discussed in a series of blogs in mid-2010 it began this process by:

  • Hiring and training salespeople and consultants steeped in these areas and created a five-stage, services-based process for guiding customers through the entire process, from solution ideation through implementation; and
  • Created a three-stage, service-led solutions incubation process that used its Internet Business Services Group (IBSG) and Advanced Services (AS) organizations to incubate new markets and create lighthouse accounts for promoting its solutions.

It promotes these solutions in its own demonstration centers and highlights them in high-profile venues such as the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. It even created its own virtual, nonprofit S+CC think tank, the Smart+Connected Communities Institute, to spur joint research and knowledge sharing, foster best practices, explore governance models, create training and education programs and eventually, create certification programs around new models of public-private partnership for achieving economic, environmental and social sustainability.

The Platform Ecosystem

But while Cisco recognizes the need to establish itself as a thought leader and to lead the recruitment, design and implementation phases of early accounts, Cisco is, first and foremost, a partner-centric company. Its goal is to package its learnings from initial lighthouse accounts, train and certify partners to use them and then work with these partners to scale new businesses (see my blog on Cisco’s Value-Added Services Partnering strategy for more details).

Cisco’s first step in creating this partner ecosystem was to create an open, standards-based platform. Its City Cloud Platform provides the network infrastructure, complete with a set of underlying horizontal collaboration and Telepresence services and open APIs on which partners can write and deliver their specialized, vertical applications and services. Its initial recruitment efforts are focused primarily on two broad classes of partners:

  • Technology partners, including industry-specific ISVs and system/software providers and providers of complementary horizontal tools such as analytics; and
  • Strategy, market development and consulting partners, primarily SIs with particularly strong positions in specific geographies and market niches.

Given the complexity and large number and range of partners required to design, develop and deliver managed services to cities, Cisco will rely even more heavily on partners for S+CC than it does in its other markets. It will, itself, focus primarily on the communications and collaboration infrastructures required to run these communities. This combined with the fact that Cisco does not plan to build vertical software or create large consulting or managed services businesses, will help it minimize conflicts within these inherently complex S+CC ecosystems.

Cisco is certainly making big investments and incurring big risks in its efforts to jumpstart and establish itself as a thought leader around its broad range of Smart+Connected Communities initiatives. But while its risks are very real, they will, in all likelihood, be relatively small. After all, even if Cisco’s “instant city” vision proves to be a bust, many of its component initiatives, as around telepresence, connected maintenance, energy management, clinical collaboration, distance learning and video surveillance, are already coming to fruition and have the potential of emerging into large, sustainable markets.

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