Autonomic Computing

IBM Transformation—A Summary of Results

IBM was on the verge of breakup: Bureaucracy, complexity, and silos was slowing IBM down—costing money and keeping the organization too opaque to function decisively. Stock prices were at a 20-year low, and the company had posted an $8.1 billion loss.

IBM drove common processes across lines of business: IBM began by breaking down barriers between lines of business, implementing enterprise-wide standards for five core processes:

• Market planning

• Product development

• Procurement

• CRM

• Fulfillment

Table 2.1. IBM Simplified Infrastructure and Governance

	Then	Now
Number of CIOs	128	1
Host data centers	55	12
Web hosting centers	80	11
Networks	31	1
Applications	16,000	5,200

Results: IT spending was reduced by 31 percent over the past ...