IBM's CEO Articulates Prescient Vision for the Enterprise—Adapting to the Knowledge Economy |
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Samuel J. Palmisano, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of IBM Corporation, outlined a new version of the enterprise at a lunch honoring him with the Executives' Club of Chicago's Thirteenth Annual International Executive of the Year Award April 12, 2007 at the Chicago Hilton. Entitled “Leadership, Trust and the Globally Integrated Enterprise,” his speech emphasized key points from his Summer 2006 article of the same name in Foreign Affairs. He was especially interesting to hear due to his experience with leading one of the world's foremost global enterprises as well as his insight from serving global enterprises in every industry.
Yesterday's model for the global enterprise, the multinational corporation (MNC), looks increasingly outdated due to widespread adoption of standards-based technology, increasingly standardized work processes and a liberalizing regulatory environment. Today, knowledge-based resources are available globally, and the enterprise's means to create value is choosing how and where to tap the resources to best execute business processes. Moreover, the shift to the globally integrated enterprise means a profound culture shift and outlook, which we will address here.
In addition, although Palmisano didn't reference IBM's visionary Component Business Modeling (CBM) in either his presentation or article, I clearly heard it in the background. Transitioning to the globally integrated enterprise model requires a completely new way of thinking about business structures and operations. I will illustrate this through brief comments about Component Business Modeling as well as Transourcing, an approach I developed in 2006.