Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: Thought Leadership Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Use of Thought Leadership in Complex Sales
 Nomination Title: A New Way of Managing Sales and Enterprise Performance
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the thought leadership achievements since July 1, 2020 of the nominated organization, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
- Briefly describe the nominated organization: its history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 199 words used.
IBM Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is IBM’s trusted source of integrated enterprise data. The platform is built with IBM’s Hybrid Cloud and AI technologies. EPM is Analytics at Scale: it provides the foundation for practically limitless application of advanced analytics across nearly all areas of IBM’s business with the scale to support IBM’s operations in 173 countries, with 280K employees, and several complex business models.
As the internal, strategic platform for IBM’s management and operational systems, EPM makes enterprise data easier to act on by delivering a single trusted source of integrated enterprise data, which accelerates insights and creates new intelligent workflows. Running entirely on IBM’s Hybrid Cloud, EPM aligns and integrates terabytes of enterprise data from hundreds of applications and reporting tools into a common data model.
The platform aggregates and validates enterprise data, including financial insights (revenue, expense, profit, signings, pipeline) and other critical enterprise data (workforce, support, procurement, real estate, marketing). This serves as a catalyst for IBM leaders to make decisions faster by providing anytime access to insights, analytics, and dynamic views to guide discussions. EPM easily scales with rapid user adoption and newly integrated data, enabling richer insights and more opportunities for predictive models.
- Outline the organization's thought leadership achievements since July 1 2020 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 243 words used.
EPM leverages AI and analytics to create intelligent workflows that connect historically siloed business processes through integrated analytics to transform how work gets done. For example, a software leader and her team can now analyse a portfolio’s revenue, sales opportunity pipeline, sales performance predictions, client support tickets, and workforce changes—all within a single, dynamic dashboard that’s rich with predictive insights. The team can drill down into specific brand or geography details to gain insights into trends through advanced analytics. Machine learning algorithms deliver insights into revenue performance, pipeline health, and business performance against targets.
EPM has eliminated the exhausting “data chase” for IBMers, saving countless hours sourcing, organizing, aligning, normalizing, validating, and integrating the data needed to understand and run the business. As a result, IBMers no longer need to compile data from multiple, disparate sources, continuously update spreadsheets to reflect changes in various systems, host meetings solely for data validation, create large presentations and wait for insights to make informed business decisions. This frees up time to deliver high value analysis and insights. EPM also redirects skilled IT resources from maintaining legacy reporting databases to developing new analytics. IBM leaders now “live on the platform” and use analytics to guide business performance.
EPM saves IBM half a million hours a year in manual work. EPM led to the sunsetting of seven major reporting platforms, aggregated 300 applications and over 3,000 reports and standardized KPIs, and shortened analytics from days to seconds.
- Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the team's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 237 words used.
The key to successful adoption is the embrace of IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking practice to build solutions designed with empathy and focused on transforming user workflows. The team worked with the IBM C-suite to transform the company’s operating meetings to “live on the platform,” replacing static slideshow presentations with live dashboards. This set the expectation for a new way of working for the entire company. The team now engages stakeholders through the IBM Garage; an approach that combines Enterprise Design Thinking, Agile, and DevOps. The EPM team co-creates dashboards through rapid prototyping to quickly provide new analytics. Critical to the team’s success is a comprehensive design guide that sets standards for creating dashboards and incorporates best practices for wireframing, visualization, and optimized performance. The EPM team also engages users through a champions network, Slack, an internal website, office hours, and frequent mixed-methods user research. New hires participate in cohorts that build dashboards together leveraging the EPM platform. Finally, the team tracks user analytics to identify where to focus additional adoption efforts. A chatbot called “AskEPM,” provides insights into business performance through natural language processing and advanced analytics.
Using IBM’s Hybrid Cloud technology, including Cloud Pak for Data, EPM integrates data following a common data model for the enterprise. EPM brings in financial data from IBM Planning Analytics and visualizes insights through dashboards run on IBM Cognos Analytics with a chatbot that leverages IBM Watson AI.
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 9 words used.
Intelligent Workflows for Business Transformation: https://www.ibm.com/services/resources/intelligent-workflows-smart-paper/
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