>>from around the globe, it's the >>Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2020 >>one brought to you >>by IBM. Hello, welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual soon we'll be back in person in real life. But this year again it's a virtual conference. I'm john for your host of the cube for more cube coverage. You got a great guest here Debbie Viviendas Global garage lead for IBM Services Global garage great program. Ah Debbie, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me. >>So we've covered the garage a lot on the cube in the past and the success, Everyone loves the garage things are born in the garage, entrepreneurship innovation has been kind of categorically known for kind of the garage start up um but also it's become um known for really agile agility and which has been a cloud phenomenon, devops and now we're seeing Deb sec apps as a big trend this year with hybrid cloud. So I gotta ask you, how is garage doing with the pandemic? I was I can almost imagine people at home kind of disrupted from the office, but maybe more creativity, maybe more energy online. What's going on with the garage? How has your transformation journey been with Covid? >>Well, don't I mean it's Covid has been the level of for us. All right, there isn't a person who hasn't had some challenge or some complexity to Yeah, and that includes our clients and I'm incredibly proud to be able to say that IBM garage because it is so digitally native. When the covid pandemic has struck around the world, every single one of our garages was able to switch to being virtual without fail without a single days lost productivity. And that I mean that's hugely beneficial to clients who are on an incredible time sensitive journey. And so we've seen as a result of Covid actually there are a huge acceleration in garages from two reasons. The number one from a virtualization perspective. Actually it's much easier when everybody's together in the same space, everybody's together virtually in the same space. And we've seen acceleration in our velocity and our collaboration because everybody is really learning how to work in that century. But to because of the pandemic, because of the pressure on our client's needs to make decisions fast. No, not guess really, be focused on their outcomes, not just doing stuff, the garage really plays to that objective for them. And so we've seen a huge rise. We've gone from 2019 to just a few 100 garages to finishing 2020 with over 2.5 1000 garages and being embedded across services and the goal of being the primary way our clients experiencing COVID has been a big accelerator. >>Sorry Debbie, can you repeat the numbers again? I just want to capture that. I missed that. >>Sure. Sure. So we finished >>training on the numbers. >>Yeah. So that we finished 2019 with just under 300 garages and we finished 2020 with just over 2.5 1000. So we've had a huge growth in the in the rain and it isn't just the number of garages, it's the range of garages and what we're what we're serving with our clients and how we're collaborating with our clients and the topics were unpacking. That is is really broadened. >>Yeah. I mean I I covered and we've reported on the garage on the Cuban also in silicon angle dot com. And the past thinks and through your your news coverage. That's amazing growth. Um I gotta believe the tailwind from Covid and just the energy around it has energized. You wanna get your thoughts on that because you know what we've reported the past, it's been about design, thinking human centered design, all those beautiful things that come with cloud, cloud scale, right? You know, you're moving faster, you're innovating. Um and so that's been kind of there, but what you're getting at with this growth is with and what Covid has proven. And again, we've been pointing this out, you're seeing the pattern, It's clear companies are either retrenching okay. Which is re factoring, redesigning, doing those things to kind of get ready to come out to cope with a growth strategy and you're seeing other companies um build net new innovations so they're building new capabilities because Covid shown them kind of pulled back the curtain if you will on where the action is. So this means there's two threads going on. You got okay, I got to transform my business and I gotta re factor and then, or hey, we got net new business models, these are kind of two different things and not mutually exclusive. What's your comment on that? >>Uh, and I think that my comment on is that is the sweet spot that garage comes into its own right. You mentioned lots of things in that, you talked about design thinking and agility and you know, these other buzzwords that are used all the time and garage of course is synonymous with those of course, you know, it's Gap uses the best design thinking and agile practices and all of those things that absolutely core to what we do, devops, even through down to design up, we have the whole range depending on what the client objective is, but I think what is really happening now is the innovation, you know, being something separate. It is no longer how to accelerate your outcomes and your business outcomes regardless of whether that is in re factoring and modernizing your existing estate or diversifying creating new ecosystems and new platforms and new offerings. Regardless of what that is, you can't do it separate to your, To your core business. I mean it's a well known fact John right, like 75 of transformation programmes failed to deliver an impact on the business performance. Right? And in the same period of time there's been huge cuts in innovation funding and that's because for the same reason because they don't deliver the impact of the business performance and that's why garage is unique because it is entirely focused on the outcome, right? But using user research through design thinking of course using agile to deliver it at speed and all of those other things, but it's focused on value, on benefits, realization and driving to your outcome. And we do that by putting that innovation at the heart of your enterprise in order to drive that transformation rather than it being something separate. >>Debbie, I saw you gave a talk uh called Innovation Is Dead. Um obviously that's a provocative title. That's an attention getter. Um tell me what you mean by that because it seems to be a setup. I mean many mentions dead. Was it with a question mark? What you're kind of trying to highlight that innovation is transformation? Or were you trying >>to do the full title? The full title was Innovation is Dead and transformation is pointless. And of course, it's meant to be an eye catching title. So people show up and listen to my pitch rather than somebody else's. But But the reality is I mean that most sincerely it's back to that step, 75 of these transformation programmes failed to deliver the impact. And I and I speculate that that is for a few reasons because the idea itself wasn't a good one or wasn't at the right time because you were unable to understand what the measure of good looked like and therefore him just be able to create that path. And in order to transform a company, you must transform the individuals within a company. And so that way of working becomes incredibly holistic and it's those three things, I think amongst the whole myriad of others are the primary reasons why those programs fail. And what garage does is it breaks this by putting innovation at the heart of your enterprise and by using data driven value orchestration. That means that we don't no, we don't guess where the value to be gained is. We know it's no longer checking ideas at the wall to see what sticks it's meaningful research. It's not searching. This is my favorite quote from my dear friend Courtney, know, who says it's not about searching for the innovation needle in the proverbial haystack. It's using your research in order to de risk your investment and drive your innovation to enable your outcomes. So if you do innovation without a view to how it's going to yield your business outcomes, I agree. I fundamentally agree that it's pointless. >>Exactly. Of course, we're on the writing side. We love titles like innovation is dead long live innovation, so that's classic. Get your attention. But I think >>Exactly, and of course what I really mean is that innovation is a separate entity, >>totally. >>There is no longer relevant for company to make sure they achieve their business >>outcome. Well, this is what I wanted to just double click on that with you on is that you look at transformation, you guys essentially saying transformation meets innovation with the garage philosophy if I get that right. Um, and, and, and it's interesting I had, and we've experienced here with the cube where the cube virtual, we're not at IBM think there is no physical game day, like >>my house. >>And, and so I was talking to a Ceo and he said, I said, hey you guys are doing really, really good. You know, we had to pivot with the cube and he goes, you guys did a good pivot yourself because no, john we did not pivot, we actually put our business on hold because of the pandemic. We actually created a line extension. So technically we're going to bring that business back when Covid is gone and we come back to real life. So it's technically not a pivot. We're not pivoting our business. We've created new functionality through the innovations that they were doing. So this is kind of like, this is the real deal here. This is like depends proven what's your share your thoughts on that? >>Well, it's just to me it's about people get so focused on the output that they lose track of the outcome, right? And so being really clear on what you're doing and why and the outcomes can be really broad that, you know, so instead of saying, you know, we're all going to implement the new E. R. P. Or build a new mobile app. That's that's that's not an outcome, right? What we should be saying is what we're trying to achieve is a 10% growth in net promoter score in china, Right in this group or whatever it is we were trying to achieve right, we want to make a 25 reduction in our operating cost base by simplifying our estate whatever those outcomes are. I mean that's the starting point and then driving that use to use as the vehicle for what is the right innovation, what is going to deliver that value and fast right garage delivers 3-5 times faster than other models and reduced delivery costs. And so it's all about that speed, speed of decision, speed of insight, speed of culture and training, speed of new skills and speed to outcomes. >>You got a great job, love what you're doing in Karaj got a great model, congratulations on the growth. Love this intersection or transformation meets innovation because innovation is transformation advice versus interplay going on there I think has proven that. Let me dig into a little bit more about the garage. What's going on? How many practitioners you guys have there now at IBM? Um, you've got growth. Are you adding more people in? I'll see virtual first. Covid. Is there still centers of design take us through what's going on at garage? >>Certainly. So I think I mentioned it right up front. Right. So our goal is to make IBM guards the primary way our clients experiences. We've proven that it delivers higher value to our clients and they get really rich and broad set of outcomes. And so in order for us to deliver on that promise, we have to be unable to cross IBM to deliver to it. Right? So over the last 18 months or so we've had a whole range of training programs and enable we have a whole badging and certification program. We have all the skills and the pathways and the career pathways to find. But garages for everybody. Right? And so it isn't about creating a selected group that can do this across IBM, this is about making all of services capable. So in 2020 we we trained over 28,000 people right? In in all the different skills that are needed from selling to execution to QA to use a research, whatever it is. And this year we're launching our garage skills academy which will take that across all of services and make it easily available. So we will, you've got to >>talk about the footprint of the global side because again, not to bring up global, but global is what yours in your title companies need to be global because now with virtual workforce is you're seeing much more tapped creativity and execution ability to execute from global teams. How does that impact you? >>Well, so garages as in its global in two perspectives. Right, So number one, we have garages all around the world. Right? It isn't it isn't just the market of you are most developed nations in the Americas and europe. It is everywhere. We see it in all emerging markets, from latin America through to you all parts of eastern europe which are really beginning to come into their own. So we see all these different garages of different different scales and opportunity. So definitely global from that image. But what what what virtualization has also enabled these truly global teams because it's really easy to go, I need one of those. Okay, I need a supply chain expert and I need an Ai expert and I need somebody who's got industry experience in whatever it is and you can quickly gather them around the virtual table faster than you can in a physical table. But we still leverage the global community >>for the network. You have an expert network there at IBM. >>You have a huge network. Yeah. And both both within IBM and of course a growing network of ecosystem partners that we continue to work >>with. Debbie. I'm really excited. Congratulations. Growth. I'm looking forward to partnering with you on your ecosystem as that develops. I can almost imagine you must be getting a lot of outside IBM practitioners and experts coming in to collaborate. It is a social construct. It's a great program. Thanks for sharing >>my pleasure. It's been great to be here. Thank >>you. Okay, IBM's global garage. Lee Debbie Vegas who's here on the queue with IBM services, a phenomenon. This is social construct is helping companies with digital transformation intersecting with innovation. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching