IBM - Best Use of Thought Leadership in Business Development

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 Business Development

Nomination Title: Intelligent Workflow Experience Builder – Building and Expanding with Speed & Efficiency

In 2020 a team within IBM Research delivered an Intelligent Workflow (IW) application for 700 sellers in the U.S. This App delivered 97% productivity improvement among other great results and many more countries and units wanted it. The team needed to immediately scale that application and expand it to more countries and teams in IBM. So, the team came-up with an entirely new approach to build and reuse software code to create new IW apps. The Intelligent Workflow Experience Builder bacame the answer. With the IW Experience Builder, IW Apps can be developed at less than half the cost, enabling fast and simple creation of changes to applications. This is achieved through re-use of best of breed practices, patterns, common reusable user interface components, standards and more, packaged into a single code base that can be configured to meet individual needs and extended to new users and legacy systems.

The Experience Builder idea was conceived in May 2020. As of September 2021, local teams across all IBM geographies are now operating their own customized version of the app, using the same base code, with the ability to modify and deliver local updates in weeks versus months or years.

A comprehensive training and development program was launched in May 2021 to create the configurable “components” and base-code to enable the IW Experience Builder. Four new squads (component developer teams) learned, developed and documented the shared, common parts of the code and components. The idea was to build the adapted code for multiple new apps, learn as they developed, test the approach, and finish with new applications and the Experience Builder. The first delivery of the configurable code and application was in March 2021 in Asia, followed quickly in July 2021 in Europe, and then adding United States: all on single code base with their customized components, and trained local teams in early September 2021. The number of users has increased from 700 to nearly 3000 in one year. Now the teams in each geography can modify the app to meet their local country needs and specifications, without impacting anyone else, and expand to more users and business areas at their own pace. Instead of taking up to a year or more to update a global app to meet multiple country needs dealing with the complexities of a global app, they can deliver customized enhancements by country in 9-12 weeks (depending on the complexity).

One of the Lead-to cash Apps created with the IW Experience Builder, enabled $57M win (Total Contract Value) for five new clients, with around 10-14% of the revenue being directly attribued to the Intelligent workflows.

Two patents associated with the IW Experience builder were filed.

This document provides more detail on the benefits, particularly the speed and productivity benefits. There is an example app and the outcome of creating it using the IW Builder. https://ibm.box.com/s/2w1uw6uixs2q4eya5sfpfj5m2ojgovce

The IW Experience Builder helps build IW Apps more quickly, efficiently and with agility, thus delivering speed to value for clients. IWs can be rapidly built by:

Creating App Front Ends by selecting and assembling pre-defined UX components, using a re-usable configuration and low-code approach.|

Creating new capabilities or refactoring legacy code into the platform with minimal effort and in a guided way.

Embedding existing User Experience Research Assets such as Quest, CollabAI, seamlessly into the Intelligent Workflows, to deliver unique differentiating capabilities versus competition

Ability to configure processes to the exact needs of the clients and adhere to their chosen back-end systems

Benefits:

Enforces automatically and with no effort App Quality and Security standards (IW Experience Builder passed external ISO 27001 certification)

Accelerates productivity and speed for developers

Removes complexity and reduces dependency on skills required to build apps resulting in at least 50% increase in efficiency.

Business professionals with no formal IT skills can modify app to adjust to business changes, increasing operational savings by 40%

Enforces consistency and adherence to design best practices to all IW Apps providing a unified user experience to drive overall user satisfaction by 35%