IBM and Sustainability: Creating a Smarter Planet

The IBM story has been one of rise, fall and subsequent recovery through self re-invention. It is a case of evolutionary learning in a constantly shifting business environment. It has embarked on, and succeeded in, major strategic transformations. Today it’s looking to provide other organisations with the capabilities to do the same, equipping them with smarter technology and systems to create change for the firm and its customers. The Smarter Planet initiative is specifically designed to help customers like local authorities, energy companies, utilities, health care and other companies manage their operations in a more sustainable way by reducing negative environmental impacts and increasing positive impacts on efficiency and throughput. “Creating a Smarter Planet” is itself a smart and successful business model which contributes to the sustainable profitable development of IBM and its customers and clients. As such it is exemplary business model transformation with all the risks and huge change management challenges that go with such a transformation. Once undisputed king of the computing world – building and selling what had become low-margin PCs, computer chips and other hardware – by the late 1990s IBM found itself unable to compete with companies from emerging countries and made the major strategic decision to move up the value chain and focus on providing IT expertise and computing services to businesses. The company’s executives recognised that not only was the world becoming smaller, due to improvements in technology and explosion of bandwidth, it was also becoming increasingly more complex, with the proliferation of inter-related systems and business partnerships. Organisations would have to become smarter if they wanted to take full advantage of this greater connectedness. In fact the world itself would be a better place with the smart use of technology by contributing to the smarter use of resources and by eliminating waste and inefficiencies.