One year old, but interesting anyway
by Volker Weber
Gana has sent me a link to an article in Businessworld India, which sheds some light on the LEAN initiative we briefly touched on:
Clearly, Global Services seems to have hit some sort of a plateau. The PwC acquisition is not yet bringing in the kind of heavyweight business IBM had hoped for. More importantly, with topline of the global services business largely flat, IBM needs to make sure that at least the bottomline is improving. And for that, it needs to cut jobs drastically in the US itself, which is likely to be far harder to accomplish than Europe. By some estimates, IBM needs to slash its US employee strength of 260,000 by half. Before it can do that, IBM India will have to be able to take up the workload of those 130,000 people that it needs to shed — and that is going to be the key factor.
Comments
Since your first posting on the subject was, other than the quoted text, auf Deutsch, it may have been missed by some.
I found this article useful in the context of the Cringely posting. I have no particular insight from the inside of IBM, but the Network World article seemed to be more fact-based than the original posting.
One fact I'd be interested in is the number of US employees. As I quoted in the other comments the NYT wrote in early 2006 of 117.000. The text above talks about 260.000. I don't think IBM doubled in one year in the US, therefor (at least) one of them has to be wrong.
Well, bottom line it's all speculation at this point.
q.e.d.
