IBM Global Business Services

The Business

In October 2002 IBM acquired PwC Consulting (PwCC) and merged
this business with its own consulting and systems integration activities
to create what is now IBM Global Business Services (GBS), the largest consulting and systems integration business in the world.

David Dockray was a member of the Global Management Board from October 2002 to his retirement in October 2007 and undertook two main roles during that period:

• Managing Partner, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) – and subsequently
• Global Leader, Strategy and Market Development

The Challenge

The new organisation in EMEA consisted of 25,000 employees with revenues exceeding $4billion. The external context at that time created a number of challenges as follows:

• reducing demand post year 2000
• increasing competition from India and other low cost locations
• excess industry wide capacity in Western Europe

In parallel, the business had to execute major internal and cultural changes as a result of merging two similar sized organisations and change of ownership requiring new reporting and control disciplines.

In summary, the major challenge for David as the leader of this business was to execute the merger, create a clear vision for the organisation and the plans to realise it, and improve both revenue growth and margins. While David was
leading these activities in EMEA, Ginni Rometty led the business worldwide –
the IBM Annual Review featured David and Ginni at the start of this journey.

The Solution

Against the background described above, David had to execute the merger at speed across EMEA, integrate the enhanced capabilities and promote them to the market place – whilst improving financial performance and growth. This was achieved by David leading the following activities:

• focusing  the merger integration actions on the key areas to make the biggest difference
• extensive communication activity to demonstrate success in the market and sustain confidence of thousands of employees through a period of major change
• promote growth through major client engagements: Aviva, Nestle, DVLA, Defra and acquisitions such as AP Moeller Information Services function  
• substantial cost reduction programmes to eliminate duplication, reduce capacity in parts of EMEA and rapid adoption of global supply chain practices to utilise lower cost locations
• implement the reporting and control systems to satisfy US regulatory requirements

The Outcome

By summer 2005 these actions had led to a unified business with top line growth and much enhanced margins, substantial changes to the cost base and operating practices and Sarbanes Oxley compliance and control status.

Mark Elliott was Chairman of IBM EMEA at that time. He is now a Non Executive Director of Reed Elsevier plc, G4S plc and Chairman of Quinetiq plc. Mark commented:

While David’s business results in EMEA were impressive, perhaps more impressive was his quick recognition that the cultures of both organisations that were to be integrated had to be transformed.

He led that transformation with a sensitive but firm hand. It is that transformation that allowed the business to sustain its performance over many quarters. 

The challenge for David was to engage a number of peers and to demonstrate that he understood the inter-relationship of the consulting business and other parts of IBM such as our hardware and software businesses. It was this understanding and the collaborative style he used in that engagement that caused these peers to provide the critical support needed to nurture the cultural change David drove across of major countries in EMEA. He earned the respect of all.

IBM Global Business Services – worldwide role

In July 2005 David was appointed to a worldwide role for the business as Global Leader, Strategy and Market development – a business with revenues of $16 billion and 100,000 people. The objective was to grow revenues and margins concurrently – an elusive target at that time.

David led the activities to formulate a new competitive strategy for the business worldwide, receiving 100% voting support from the senior leadership team of that business for the strategy.
In parallel, a major set of activities were set in train to enhance near term performance as follows:

• value creation approaches to pricing and commercial agreements with clients
• growth initiatives covering account management, solution selling, industry-based capability building and new service line offerings
• global delivery methods to reduce blended delivery costs of client assignments 
• delivery excellence programmes to reduce waste and error rates

The outcome of these programmes and the implementation of the overall strategy resulted in the following published performance for the business by the last quarter of 2007 – the time of David’s retirement from IBM:

• revenue growth in six consecutive quarters to exceed 10% for the first time – and 
• margins achieving double digit percentages

Ginni Rometty was leading the business worldwide throughout this period.
She is now Chairman, President and CEO of IBM Corporation worldwide.
On David’s retirement she said:

David’s legacy as a leader – with clients, our people and important
business initiatives – is unquestioned, and he never wavered on the strategic importance of what we started five years ago. Today, the
strategy that bears his imprint has carried us to a new level of
performance and positioned us to take the next step to market
leadership.

And while he was architecting the strategy and leading the
re-commitment to industry leadership, David maintained his
commitment to clients like Nestle, Shell, Norwich Union,
Unilever and DVLA where we delivered some of our most successful
and innovative transformation programmes – many on a global scale.