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发帖数: 42116 | 1 I’ve been hearing since before Christmas about Project Chrome, the code
name for what has been touted to me as the biggest reorganization in IBM
history. Well, Project Chrome is finally upon us, triggered I suppose by
this week’s announcement of an 11th consecutive quarter of declining
revenue for IBM. Project Chrome is bad news, not good. Customers and
employees alike should expect the worst.
To fix its business problems and speed up its “transformation,” next week
about 26 percent of IBM’s employees will be getting phone calls from their
managers. A few hours later a package will appear on their doorsteps with
all the paperwork. Project Chrome will hit many of the worldwide services
operations. The USA will be hit hard, but so will other locations. IBM’s
contractors can expect regular furloughs in 2015. One in four IBMers reading
this column will probably start looking for a new job next week. Those
employees will all be gone by the end of February.
In the USA mainframe and storage talent will see deep cuts. This is a bit
short-sighted and typical for IBM. They just announced the new Z13 mainframe
and hope it will stimulate sales. Yet they will be cutting the very teams
needed to help move customers from their old systems to the new Z13.
The storage cuts are likely to be short-sighted, too. Most cloud services
use different storage technology than customers use in their data centers.
This makes data replication and synchronization difficult. IBM’s cloud
business needs to find a way to efficiently work well with storage systems
found in customer data centers. Whacking the storage teams won’t help with
this problem.
Project Chrome appears to be a pure accounting resource action — driven by
the executive suite and designed to make IBM’s financials look better for
the next few quarters. Global Technology Services, the outsourcing part of
IBM, is continuing to lose customers. That rate of loss — one Lufthansa-
size customer every six weeks — seems to be holding. The size of Project
Chrome cuts suggest IBM is trying to get three or four quarters ahead of the
expected business losses. At this point IBM’s business losses have become
a self-fulfilling process with deep cuts followed by increasingly bad
service, increasingly madder customers, and more lost business.
The biggest reorganization in IBM’s history will not really begin until the
Project Chrome resource actions are done. People let go will be excluded
from consideration for the new business units. In a few months those new
business units will start to work calling on IBM customers to sell them on
the new CAMSS (Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Security) stuff. They
will walk into a hornet’s nest.
Some reorganizations are well thought-out and absolutely essential but
Project Chrome won’t be one of those. It will traumatize the corporation
and put most accounts into immediate crisis. While survivors dig out from
the devastation IBM will change their managers and their job descriptions.
With fewer people and changing roles, things IBM has contractual obligations
to do for its customers will start to be overlooked. If you are an IBM
customer you should probably should start working on plans to keep your
projects moving forward and your systems running.
If you are an investor or Wall Street analyst it’s time to take a closer
look at IBM’s messaging. Stop believing everything you hear from IBM. Big
Blue is a master at controlling the discussion. They state or announce
something, treating it as fact whether it exists or not. They build a story
around it. IBM uses this approach to control competitors, to manage customer
expectations, and to conduct business on IBM’s terms.
So while IBM is supposedly transforming, they are also losing business and
customers every quarter. What are they actually doing to fix this? Nothing.
In saying the company is in a transition and is going to go through the
biggest reorganization in its history, will this really fix a very obvious
customer relationship problem? No, it won’t. |
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