 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got an alumni joining me and a brand new guest to theCUBE. Please welcome Paul Papas, the global managing partner for IBM Global Business Services, business transformation services. Paul, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. Thanks, Lisa, great to be here with you today. And Dominique Dubois is here as well. She is the Global Strategy and Offerings Leader in Business Transformation Services or BTS at IBM. Dominique, welcome to the program. Thanks, Lisa, great to be here. So we're going to be talking about accelerating business transformation with intelligent workflows. We're going to break through all that, but Paul, we're going to start with you. Since we last got together with IBM, a lot has changed. So much transformation, so much acceleration of transformation. Talk to me from your perspective, how have you seen the way that businesses running change and what some of the changes in the future are going to be? Well, you hit on two key words there, Lisa, and thanks so much for that question. You know, two key words that you hit on were change and acceleration. And that's exactly what we see. We were seeing this before the pandemic. And if anything, what the pandemic did, when things started kind of spreading around the world early last year, around January, February, timeframe, we saw that word acceleration really take hold. Every one of our clients were looking for new ways to accelerate the change that they had already planned to adapt to this new normal or this new abnormal, depending on how you view it. In fact, we did a study recently, an IBV study, that's our Institute of Business Value, and found that six out of 10 organizations were accelerating all of their transformation initiatives that they had already planned. And that's exactly what we're seeing happening right now in all parts of the world and across all industries, this acceleration to transform. So one of the things that we've talked about for years, Paul, you know, before the pandemic was even a thing, is that there was a lot of perceived technical barriers in terms of like the tech maturity for organizations and employees being opposed to change. People obviously can be a challenger, they're used to doing things the way they are. But as you just said in that IBV survey, nearly 60% of businesses say we have to accelerate our transformation due to COVID, probably initially to survive and then thrive. Talk to me about some of those barriers that were there a little over a year ago and how businesses, 60 plus percent of them, have moved those out of the way. You know at IBM, we've got 109 year history of being a technology innovation company. And the rate of pace of technical change is always increasing. It's something that we love and that we're comfortable with. But the rate and pace of change is always unsettling and there's always a human element to change. And the human element is always the rate, the rate setter in terms of the amount of change that you can have in an organization. You know, our former chairman, Ginni Rometti used to say that growth and comfort cannot coexist. And it's so true because changing is uncomfortable. It's unsettling. It can be nerve wracking. It can instill fear and fear can be paralyzing in terms of driving change. And what we also see is there's a disconnect a lot of times and that IBV study that I was referring to before, you know, we saw results coming back where 78% of executives feel that they have provided the training and enablement to help their employees transform to new required skills and new ways of working, but only half of the people survey felt the same way. Similarly, we saw a disconnect in terms of companies feeling that they're providing the right level of health and wellness support during the pandemic and only half of the employees responding back that they feel that they're getting that level of support. So the people change aspect of doing a transformation or adapting to new circumstances is always the most critical component and always the hardest component. And when we talk about helping our clients do that in IBM, that's our services organization. That's the organization that Dominique and DuBois are representing here today. You know, I'm responsible for business transformation services within our organization. We help our clients adapt using new technologies, transforming the way they work, but also addressing the people change elements that could be so difficult and hitting them head-on so that they can make sure that they can survive and thrive in a meaningful and lasting way in this new world. One of the hardest things is that cultural transformation, regardless of a pandemic. So I can't imagine. I'd love to get one more thing, Paul, from you before we head over to Dominique. IBM used an 109-year-old organization. Talk to me about the IBM pledge. This is something that came up last year. Huge organization, massive changes last year, not just the work from home, the mental concerns and issues that people had. What did IBM do as a grassroots effort that went viral? Yeah, so it's really great. So when the pandemic started, we all had to shift to working from home. And as you mentioned, IBM is a 109-year-old company. We have over 300,000 employees working in 170 countries. So we had to move this entire workforce, 370,000 humans, to working in a new way that many of which have never done before. And when we started experiencing it, the minute we did that, within a few weeks, my team and I were talking, Dominique is on my team, and we were having conversations where we were feeling really exhausted just a few weeks into this. And it was because we were constantly on Webex, we were constantly connected, and we're all used to working really hard. We travel a lot, we're always with our clients. So it wasn't that you have a team that was adapting to working more hours or longer hours, but this was fundamentally different. And we saw that with schools shutting down and lockdowns happening in different parts of the world, the home life balance was getting immediately difficult to impossible to deal with. We have people that are taking care of elderly parents, people that are homeschooling children, other personal life situations that everyone had to navigate in the middle of a pandemic, locked at home with different restrictions on when you can go out and get things done. So we got together as a group, and we just started talking about how can we help? How can we help make life just a little bit easier for all of our people? And we started writing down some things that we would commit to doing with each other, how we would address each other. And what that gave birth to was what we call the IVM work from home pledge. And it's a set of principles all grounded in the belief that if we act this way, we might just be able to make life just a little bit easier for each other, and it's grounded in empathy. And there are parts of the pledge that are pledging to be kind, recognizing that in this new digital world that we're showing up on camera inside of everyone's home. We're guests in each other's homes. So let's make sure that we act appropriately as guests in each other's home. So if children run into the frame during the middle of a meeting or dogs start barking during the middle of a meeting, just roll with it. Don't call a lot of attention to it. Don't make people feel self-conscious about it. Pledge the support to your fellow IBMers by making time for personal needs. So if someone has to do homeschooling in the middle of the day, like Dominique's got triplets, she's got to do homeschooling in the middle of the day, block that time off. And we will respect that time on your calendar and just work around it and just deal with it. There are other things like respecting not camera ready times. As someone who's now been on camera every day, it feels like for the last 14 months, we want to respect the time that people, when they have their cameras off and not pressure them to put their cameras on, saying things like, hey, I can't see you. There's no reason to add more pressure to everyone's life. If someone's camera's off, it's all for a reason. And then other things like pledging to checking on each other, pledging to set boundaries and tend to our own self-care. So we published that as a group. We just, again, and we put it on a Slack channel. So it's kind of our communication method inside the company. And it was just intended to be for my organization, but it started going viral and tens of thousands of IBMers started taking the pledge and ultimately caught the attention of our CEO. And he loved it, shared it with his leadership team, which I'm a part of. And then also then went on LinkedIn and publicly took the pledge as well, which then also got more excitement and interaction with other companies as well. So grassroots efforts all grounded in showing empathy and helping to make life just a little bit easier for everyone. So important. I'm going to look that up and I'm going to tell you as a person who speaks with many tech companies a week, a lot of businesses could take a lead from that and it gets really important. And you're right. We are inviting each other into our homes. And I see you're a big Broadway fan. I'll have to ask you that after we wrap. Dominic, I don't know how you're doing any of this with triplets. I only have two dogs, but I'd love to know this sense of urgency that is everywhere you're living at. Paul talked about it with respect to the acceleration of transformation. How from your lens is IBM helping customers address the urgency, the need to pivot, the need to accelerate, the need to survive and thrive with respect to digital transformation actually getting it done. Right, right. Thanks, Lisa. That's so true. I mean, our clients are really needing to and ready to move with haste, right? That sense of urgency can be felt, I think across every country, every market, every industry. And so we're really helping our clients accelerate their digital transformations. And we do that through something that we call intelligent workflows. And so workflows in and of themselves are basically how organizations get work done. But intelligent workflows are how we infuse predictive properties, automation, transparency, agility end to end across a workflow. So pulling those processes together so they're not salad anymore and infusing. So it's simply put, we bring intelligent workflows to our clients and it fundamentally reinvents how they're getting work done from a digital perspective, from a predictive perspective, from a transparency perspective. And I think what really stands apart when we deliver this with our clients and partnership with our clients is how it not only delivers value to the bottom line to the top line, right? It also actually delivers greater value to their employees, to the customers, to the partner, to their broader ecosystem. And intelligent workflows are really made up of three core elements, right? The first is around better utilizing data. So aggregating, analyzing, getting deeper insight out of data and then using that insight, not just for employees to make better decisions, but actually to support for emerging technologies to leverage, right? So we talked about AI, automation, IoT, blockchain, all of these technologies require vast amounts of data and what we're able to bring both from the internal and external source from a data perspective really underpins, right? What these emerging technologies can do. And then the third area is skills, right? Our skills that we bring to the table, but also our clients' deep, deep expertise, partner expertise, expertise from the ecosystem at large. And pulling all of that together is how we're really able to help our clients accelerate their digital transformations because we're helping them shift, right? From a set of siloed static processes to an end-to-end workflow. We're helping them make fewer predictions based on the past, historical data, and actually taking more real-time action with real-time insight. So it really is a fundamental shift in how your work is getting done to really being able to provide that, you know, emerging technologies, data, deep skills based end-to-end workflow. That word fundamental has such gravity and I know we say data has gravity, but being fundamental in such an incredibly dynamic time is really challenging. But I was looking through some of the notes that you guys provided me with. And in terms of what you just talked about, Dominique, you know, versus making a change to a silo, the benefits, and making changes to a spectrum of integrated processes, the values can be huge. In fact, I was reading that changing a single process like billing, for example, might deliver up to 20% improved results, integrating across multiple processes, right? Billing, collections, organizations can achieve, double that up to 40%. And then there's more, taking the intelligent workflow across all lead to cash. This was huge. Clients can get 50 to 70% more value from that. So that just shows that fundamental impact that intelligent workflows can make. Right, I mean, it really is, when you see it, it really is about unlocking exponential value, right? So when you think about crossing end-to-end workflow, but also, you know, really enhancing what clients are doing and what companies are doing today with those exponential technologies from kind of single use, say automation POC here and AI application POC here, actually integrating those technologies together and applying them at scale. I think when I think intelligent workflows, I think acceleration, right? I think exponential value, but I also really think about at scale, right? Because it's really the ability to apply these technologies, the expertise at scale that allows us to start to unlock a lot of that value. So let's go over, Paul, in the last few minutes that we have here, I wanna talk about IBM garage and how this is helping clients to really transform those workflows. Talk to me a little bit about what IBM garage is. I know it's not IBM garage band, and I know it's been around since before the pandemic, but help us understand what that is and how it's delivering value to customers. Well, first, let me be the first to invite you to join the IBM garage band, Lisa. So we'd love to have you. No musical experience required. Oh, I can sing. All right, I'm in. We're ready for you. Now, so let me talk to you about IBM garage and I do wanna key on two words that Dominique was mentioning, speed and scale. Because that's what our clients are really looking for when they're doing transformations around intelligent workflows. How can you transform at scale but do that with speed and that really becomes the critical issue. As Dominique mentioned, there's a lot of companies that can help you do a proof of concept. Do something in a few weeks that you can test an idea out and have something that's kind of like a throwaway piece of work that maybe proves a point or disproves a point. But even if it does prove the point, at that point you'd have to restart anew to try to get something that you could actually scale either in a production technology environment or scale as a change across an organization. And that's where IBM garage comes in. It's our way of helping our clients co-create, co-execute and then co-operate innovating at scale. So we use methods like design thinking inside of IBM. We've trained several hundred thousand people on design thinking methods. I'll be used to technologies like Neural and other things that help our clients co-create in a dynamic environment. And what's amazing for me is that because of the way we work, we were doing work with clients in a garage with using IBM garage in a garage environment before the pandemic. And one of our clients, Free-O-Lay of North America is an example where we've helped them innovate at scale and speed using IBM garage over a long period of time. And when the pandemic hit, we in fact were running 11 garages across 11 different workflow areas for them. The pandemic hit and everyone was sent home. So we all instantly overnight had to work from home together with Free-O-Lay. And what was great is that we were able to quickly adapt the garage method to working in a virtual world. So being able to run that same type of innovation and then use that innovation at scale in a virtual world. We did that overnight. And since that time, which happened, that happened back in March of last year. Throughout the pandemic, we've run over 1,500 different garage engagements with all of our clients all around the world in a virtual environment. It's just an incredible way, like I said, to help our clients innovate at scale. That's fantastic. Go ahead, Dominique. Oh, sorry, let's just say just a great example. You know, we partnered with Flight Safety International, they trained pilots. And I think a great example of that speed and scale is in less than 12 weeks, due to the garage methodology and the partnership with Flight Safety, we created with them and launched an adaptive learning solution. So a platform as well as a complete change to their training workflow, such that they had personalized, kind of real-time, next-best training for how they train their pilots with simulators. So reducing their cycle time, but also improving the training that their pilots get, which as people who normally travel, it's really important to us, right? And everyone else. So just a really good example, less than 12 weeks, right? Start to finish. Right, talk about acceleration. Paul, last question for you. We've got about 30 seconds left. I know this is an ecosystem effort of IBM. It's ecosystem partners, it's alliance partners. How are you helping align the right partner with the right customer or the right use case? Yeah, it's great. And our CEO, Arvin Krishna, has really ushered in this era where we are all about the open ecosystem here at IBM and working with our ecosystem partners. In our services business, we have partnerships with all the major technology players. We have a 45-year relationship with SAP. We've done more SAP S4HANA implementations than anyone in the world. We've got the longest-standing consulting relationship with Salesforce. We've got a unique relationship with Adobe where we're their only services and technology partner in the ecosystem. And we just recently won three prestigious partner awards with them. And most recently, we've got a partnership with Solonis, which is an incredible process execution software company, process mining software company that's going to help us transform intelligent workflows in an accelerated way, embedded in our garage environment. So ecosystem is critical to our success, but more importantly, it's critical to our client's success. We know that no one alone has the answers and no one alone can help anyone change. So with this open ecosystem approach that we take in global business services and our business transformation services organization, we're able to make sure that we bring our clients the best of everyone's capabilities, whether it's our technology partners, our services, IBM's own technology capabilities, all in the mix, all orchestrated in service to our clients' needs, all with the goal of driving superior business outcomes for them. And helping those customers in any industry to accelerate their business transformation with those intelligent workflows in a very dynamic time. This is a topic we could keep talking about. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but thank you both for stopping by and sharing with me what's going on with respect to intelligent workflows, the incremental exponential value. It's helping organizations to deliver and all the work that IBM is doing to enable its customers to be thrivers of tomorrow. We appreciate talking to you. Thanks, Lisa. Thank you. For Paul Papas and Dominique Dubois, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, the digital event experience.