What does IBM hope to accomplish through SSME? One big thing is to build a base of appropriately skilled workers. Our business is focused more and more on service -- more than 50 percent of IBM's revenue is from services -- but college graduates at both the undergraduate and graduate levels do not have the breadth of experience needed to hit the ground running in our service business. SSME aims to develop knowledge and skills that are both broad across a range of areas -- social science, engineering, business -- and deep in a specific area, such as IT or marketing. At our recent Palisades meetings, Nick Donofrio said that IBM would hire 50,000 service scientists in the next 10 years -- if we could.
Does SSME hold the key to a long-discussed need for IT's alignment with the business? Service businesses pose a unique set of challenges, not only from a management and technology perspective, but also from an innovation perspective. Being innovative in service requires that the people and the organizations align with the business and that the technology support both. The novelty, insight and innovation can come from any of these angles, but the whole system -- people, technology, business -- has to move together. That is what SSME is all about: making this kind of system thinking second nature.
If you think Steve Carell's character on the NBC show The Office is no more than a figment of some comedy writer's imagination, many of us would like to get a job in your office. According to a recent online poll by corporate training firm VitalSmarts, 93 percent of the 963 respondents say they work with an "untouchable" like Carell's Michael Scott -- someone who manages to remain employed despite behavioral traits like dishonesty, abrasiveness, pettiness and vulgarity, and who generally has poor job performance.
Most people choose not to confront untouchables (see chart), but VitalSmarts' Joseph Grenny, who is a co-author of Crucial Confrontations (McGraw-Hill, 2004), has some tips for doing so effectively: Start by communicating respect; use concrete facts, avoiding judgmental terms; motivate by outlining the natural consequences of an untouchable's behavior in a way that matters to him; and invite the untouchable to share his thoughts and even to show you where you are wrong. You should take the matter to your boss only if you're not successful in this confrontation, and then you should use the same techniques in talking to him.
The European Union is taking a look at Ireland's Fastrack to IT initiative as it considers replicating the program in its member states. FIT was set up by 18 of the largest technology companies working in Ireland, including Dell Inc., Microsoft Corp., AOL LLC and Intel Corp. Working with local communities, FAS (Ireland's national training and employment authority) and vocational education committees, FIT has trained about 5,000 long-term unemployed adults since its founding in 1999. Of those, about 3,000 have gotten jobs in the IT sector, and 600 have gone on to further education. According to Ireland's SiliconRepublic.- com, the success of the program has drawn the attention of officials in the European Commission's Education and Culture Department.