What Challenges Do Global Teams at Ibm Face and How Is Ibm Helping Them to Deal with These Challenges?

What challenges do global teams at IBM face and how is IBM helping them to deal with these challenges?

While providing a vast array of services, the global IBM teams also face a vast array of difficulties. “With 375,000 people on six continents” (Jones, G.R., George, J.M. 2009), there are bound to be issues. Some of the challenges to the IBM global teams are: Where do you put all your employees? How do you develop their skills? How do you move the work to the employee or the employee to the work? How do you stop local vendors from favoring local clients? How do you get employees in different countries, different time zones, to communicate with each other?

When Robert Moffat was tasked to help with the globalization of IBM his first priority was to find locations where IBM could service clients from all around the globe. Moffat established administrative centers in places such as Shanghai and Buenos Aires. Initially some longtime employees found the changes difficult to accept. Instead of thinking of IBM as one large company the employees generally thought of themselves as a separate company, for the globalization to work this would have to change.

Robert Moffat also helped to create a database that contained detailed employee profiles. These profiles list the employees availability and job skills. This database is continuously updated by employees and their managers as employee skills and experience increase.

Before the Professional Marketplace database was created project managers assemble their teams largely made up of people they currently or previously worked with. As IBM expanded globally this was no longer a viable option. Professional Marketplace uses other managers to monitor the database and route employees to the necessary teams that has need of his or her skills. This database has saved a considerable amount of time to assemble a team and saved IBM hundreds of