IBM CIO Focuses on User Experience to Keep Staff Happy
June 19 2019 - 7:18PM
Dow Jones News
By Sara Castellanos
Fletcher Previn, chief information officer of International
Business Machines Corp., is prioritizing design thinking and the
user experience in the development of internal applications and
systems, in an effort to attract and retain employees.
"Today's best user experience is tomorrow's minimum
expectation," said Mr. Previn, who oversees a global team of about
12,000 employees that provide technology for about 350,000 IBM
staffers.
Mr. Previn defines design thinking as a focus on experience over
new features. He is among a growing number of CIOs who point to the
benefits of the decade-old methodology that Silicon Valley firms
and others use to improve products or solve problems. State Street
Corp. CIO Antoine Shagoury, for example, told CIO Journal in March
that he spearheaded a crash course in design thinking.
Mr. Previn was named CIO in 2017, succeeding Jeff Smith, who
helped institute a culture of agile software development and sought
to transform IBM's information-technology division by innovating as
quickly as smaller companies, but with hundreds of thousands of
employees.
Soon after Mr. Previn became CIO, he hired an executive
reporting to him to oversee a team of dozens of people who design
IT services while taking into account user research, workflow and
metrics.
New employees expect that the IT services they use at work will
be as good as or better than the technology they use at home, he
said. To be competitive and attract talent, "we have to create an
environment where talented engineers want to work," he added.
To that end, Mr. Previn and the design team have created new
ways for employees to get and set up new devices. Device
provisioning, or the act of assigning employees laptops, desktops
and mobile phones with the appropriate encryption, email and
productivity software, can be costly and time-consuming for IT
departments.
Mr. Previn's user-research team oversaw a monthslong project in
which they observed how much friction was involved for employees
setting up their laptops. Many of the steps are now automated and
cloud-based, similar to the way a consumer would be able to set up
a device out of the box. "That's materially different from an
experience standpoint," Mr. Previn said.
Another area that benefited from design thinking was the way in
which employees get new devices. IBM staffers typically could order
a new laptop every four years, but Mr. Previn's team found that
only 30% of them responded to emails informing them they were due
for a refresh -- many were fine using their existing computers.
The company decided to use its IBM Watson
artificial-intelligence system to gauge the physical health of an
employee's device, including its memory and operating system, to
help predict hardware failure. That way, employees know whether
their devices are in dire need of upgrades. Staffers can also order
a new laptop anytime, Mr. Previn said.
"I see myself as an advocate for the IBM employee experience,"
Mr. Previn said.
IBM Chief Executive Ginni Rometty has said that methods such as
design thinking have been used in the company's human resources and
research and development groups.
"Design is a true discipline that can be applied to almost any
problem," making technology simpler and easier to use, Ms. Rometty
said in January.
IBM cut about 2,000 jobs this month amid moves to reshape its
business to focus on high-value segments of the IT market, The Wall
Street Journal has reported. In April, IBM reported its third
consecutive quarter of declining revenue, as efforts to expand in
cloud computing and artificial intelligence haven't been enough to
offset slower growth in equipment sales and services.
Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 19, 2019 19:03 ET (23:03 GMT)
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