 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. Soon we'll be back in person in real life, but this year, again, it's a virtual conference. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE for more CUBE coverage. We've got a great guest here, Debbie Vivangus, global garage lead for IBM services, global garage, great program. Debbie, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So we've covered the garage a lot on theCUBE in the past and the success. Everyone loves the garage. Things are born in the garage. Entrepreneurship, innovation has been kind of categorically known for kind of the garage startup. Absolutely. But also it's become known for really agility in which has been a cloud phenomenon on DevOps. And now we're seeing DevSecOps as a big trend this year with hybrid cloud. So I got to ask you, how is garage doing with the pandemic? I was like, I almost imagined people at home kind of disrupted from the office, but maybe more creativity, maybe more energy online. What's going on with the garage? How has your transformation journey been with COVID? Well, I mean, it's COVID has been the leveler for us all, right? There isn't a person who hasn't had some challenge or some complexity to undo. And that includes our clients. And I'm incredibly proud to be able to say that IBM garage, because it is so digitally native, when the COVID pandemic has struck around the world, every single one of our garages was able to switch to being virtual without fail, without a single day's lost productivity. And that, I mean, that's hugely beneficial to clients who are on an incredible time sensitive journey. And so we've seen as a result of COVID, actually there are a huge acceleration in garages from two reasons. The number one, from a virtualization perspective, actually it's much easier when everybody's together in the same space. Everybody's together virtually in the same space. And we've seen, you know, acceleration in our velocity and our collaboration because everybody is really learning how to work in that same space. But two, because of the pandemic, because of the pressure on our clients needs to make decisions fast, no, not guess, really be focused on their outcomes, not just doing stuff. The garage really plays to that objective for them. And so we've seen a huge rise. You know, we've gone from in 2019 to just a few hundred garages to finishing 2020 with over two and a half thousand garages and it being embedded across services and with the goal of being the primary way our clients experience. COVID has been a big accelerator. Sorry, Debbie, can you repeat the numbers again? I just want to capture that. I missed that. Sure, sure. So we finished 20... Double take on the numbers. Yeah. So we finished 2019 with just under 300 garages and we finished 2020 with just over two and a half thousand. So we've had a huge growth in the rain and it isn't just the number of garages, it's the range of garages and what we're serving with our clients and how we're collaborating with our clients and the topics we're unpacking that is really broadened. Yeah, I mean, I covered and we've reported on the garage and on theCUBE and also on silkenangle.com and the past things and through your news coverage. But that's amazing growth. I got to believe the tailwind from COVID and just the energy around it has energized. You don't want to get your thoughts on that because, you know, what we've reported in the past has been about design, thinking, human centered design, all those beautiful things that come with cloud scale, right, you know, you're moving faster, you're innovating. And so that's been kind of there. But what you're getting at with this growth is and what COVID has proven, and again, we've been pointing this out, you've seen the pattern. It's clear, companies are either retrenching, okay, which is refactoring, redesigning, doing those things to kind of get ready to come out of COVID with a growth strategy and you're seeing other companies build net new innovations. So they're building new capabilities because COVID has shown them kind of pulled back the curtain, if you will, on where the action is. So this means there's two threads going on. You got, okay, I got to transform my business and I got a refactor and then, oh, hey, we got net new business models. These are kind of two different things and not mutually exclusive. What's your comment on that? And I think that my comment on it is that is the sweet spot that Garage comes into its own, right? You mentioned lots of things in that. You talked about design, thinking and agility and, you know, these other buzzwords that are used all the time and Garage, of course, is synonymous with those. Of course, you know, it uses the best design thinking and agile practices and all of those things that are absolutely core to what we do, dev ops, even through down to design ops, you know, we have the whole range depending on what the client objective is. But I think what is really happening now is the innovation, you know, being something separate is no longer how to accelerate your outcomes and your business outcomes, regardless of whether that is in refactoring and modernizing your existing estate or diversifying, creating new ecosystems and new platforms and new offerings. Regardless of what that is, you can't do it separate to your core business. I mean, it's a well-known fact, John, right? Like 75% of transformation programs fail to deliver an impact to the business performance, right? And in the same period of time, there's been huge cuts in innovation funding and that's because of the same reason because they don't deliver the impact to the business performance. And that's why Garage is unique because it is entirely focused on the outcome, right? But using user research through design thinking, of course, using agile to deliver it at speed and all of those other things, but it's focused on value, on benefits realization and driving to your outcome. And we do that by putting that innovation at the heart of your enterprise in order to drive that transformation rather than it being something separate. Debbie, I saw you gave a talk called Innovation is Dead. Obviously, that's a provocative title. That's an attention-getter. Tell me what you mean by that because it seems to be a setup. I mean, the invention is dead. Was it with a question mark, were you kind of trying to highlight that innovation is transformation or were you trying to highlight? The full title was Innovation is Dead and Transformation is Pointless. And of course it's meant to be an eye-catching title so people show up and listen to my pitch rather than somebody else's. But the reality is, I mean it most sincerely, it's back to that stat. 75% of these transformation programs fail to deliver the impact. And I speculate that that is for a few reasons because the idea itself wasn't a good one or wasn't at the right time because you were unable to understand what the measure of good looked like and therefore just be able to create that path. And in order to transform a company, you must transform the individuals within a company. And so that way of working becomes incredibly holistic. And it's those three things that I think amongst a whole myriad of others are the primary reasons why those programs fail. And what Garage does is it breaks those by putting innovation at the heart of your enterprise and by using data-driven value orchestration. That means that we don't know, we don't guess where the value to be gained is. We know it's no longer checking ideas at the wall to see what sticks. It's meaningful research. It's not searching through, this is my favorite quote from my dear friend, Courtney Noel, who says, it's not about searching for the innovation needle in the proverbial haystack. It's using your research in order to de-risk your investment and drive your innovation to enable your outcomes. And so if you do innovation without a view to how it's going to yield your business outcomes, I agree. I fundamentally agree that it's pointless. Yeah, exactly. Of course, we're on the writing side. We love titles like innovation is dead, long-lived innovation. So that's classic to get your attention, but I think- Exactly, exactly. And of course, what I really mean is that innovation is a separate entity. Totally. It's no longer relevant for the company to make sure they achieve their business outcomes. Well, this is what I wanted to just double click on that with you on, is that you look at transformation. You guys essentially saying transformation meets innovation with the Garage philosophy and I get that right. And it's interesting, I had, and we've experienced this here with theCUBE, where theCUBE virtual, we're not at IBM, I think. There is no physical game day like second normally do. Well, and as you can see, I'm at my house. And so I was talking to a CEO and he said, I said, hey, you guys are doing really, really good. You know, we had to pivot with theCUBE. And he goes, you guys did a good pivot yourself. He goes, no, John, we did not pivot. We actually put our business on hold because of the pandemic. We actually created a line extension. So technically we're going to bring that business back when COVID is gone and we come back to real life. So it's technically not a pivot. We're not pivoting our business. We've created new functionality through the innovations that they were doing. So this is kind of like, this is the real deal here. This is like the pandemic proven. What's your share of thoughts on that? Well, it's just to me, people get so focused on the output that they lose track of the outcome, right? And so being really clear on what you're doing and why and the outcomes can be really broad. So instead of saying, you know, we're all going to implement a new ERP or build a new mobile app, that's not an outcome, right? What we should be saying is what we're trying to achieve is a 10% growth in net promoter score in China, right? In this group or whatever it is we were trying to achieve, right? Or we want to make a 25% reduction in operating cost base by simplifying our estate. Whatever those outcomes are, that's the starting point. And then driving that to use as the vehicle for what is the right innovation, what is going to deliver that value and fast, right? Garage delivers three to five times faster than other models and a reduced delivery cost. And so it's all about that speed, speed of decisions, speed of insight, speed of culture and training, speed of new skills and speed to outcomes. Well, Deb, you got a great job, love what you're doing and Garage's got a great model. Congratulations on the growth. Love this intersection or transformation meets innovation because innovation is transformation and vice versa's interplay going on there. I think Code has proven that. Let me dig into a little bit more about the Garage, what's going on. How many practitioners do you guys have there now at IBM? You got growth, are you adding more people in? How's the virtual first? COVID, is there still centers of design? Take us through what's going on at Garage. Certainly. So like, I think I mentioned it right up front, right? So our goal is to make IBM Garage the primary way our clients experience us. We've proven that it delivers higher value to our clients and they get really rich and broad set of outcomes. And so in order for us to deliver on that promise, we have to be enabled across IBM to deliver to it, right? So over the last 18 months or so, we've had a whole range of training programs and enabled. We have a whole badging and certification program. We have all the skills and the pathways and the career pathways defined, but Garage is for everybody, right? And so it isn't about creating a selected group that can do this across IBM. This is about making all of services capable. So in 2020, we trained over 28,000 people, right? In all the different skills that are needed from selling to execution to QA, to user research, whatever it is. And this year we're launching our Garage Skills Academy, which will take that across all of services and make it easily available. So we've got hundreds of thousands. And talk about the footprint on the global side, because again, not to bring up global, but global is what yours in your title. Companies need to be global because now with virtual workforces, you're seeing much more tapped creativity and ability to execute from global teams. How does that impact you? Well, so Garage is global in two perspectives, right? So number one, we have Garage is all around the world, right? It isn't just the market of, you know, our most developed nations in Americas and Europe. It is everywhere we see it in all emerging markets from Latin America through to, you know, all parts of Eastern Europe, which are really beginning to come into their own. So we see all these different garages of different scales and opportunities. So definitely global from that niche, but what virtualization has also enabled is truly global teams, because it's really easy to go, oh, I need one of those. Okay, I need a supply chain expert and I need an AI expert and I need somebody who's got industry experience in whatever it is. And you can quickly gather them around the virtual table, faster than you can in a physical table, but we still leverage the global communities. It's an expert network. It's you have an expert network there at IBM. We have a huge network, yeah. And both within IBM and of course, a growing network of ecosystem partners that we continue to work with. Well, Debbie, I'm really excited and congratulations on the growth. I'm looking forward to partnering with you on your ecosystem as that develops. I can almost imagine you must be getting a lot of outside IBM practitioners and experts coming in to collaborate. It is a social construct. It's a great program. Thanks for sharing. My pleasure. It's been great to be here. Thank you. Okay, IBM's global garage lead, Debbie Vivengas, who's here on theCUBE with IBM Services, a phenomenon that's a social construct that's helping companies with digital transformation, intersecting with innovation. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.