IBM CIO Focuses on User Experience to Keep Staff Happy

By Sara Castellanos

Fletcher Previn, chief information officer of International Business Machines Corp., is prioritizing design thinking and the user experience in the development of internal applications and systems, in an effort to attract and retain employees.

"Today's best user experience is tomorrow's minimum expectation," said Mr. Previn, who oversees a global team of about 12,000 employees that provide technology for about 350,000 IBM staffers.

Mr. Previn defines design thinking as a focus on experience over new features. He is among a growing number of CIOs who point to the benefits of the decade-old methodology that Silicon Valley firms and others use to improve products or solve problems. State Street Corp. CIO Antoine Shagoury, for example, told CIO Journal in March that he spearheaded a crash course in design thinking.

Mr. Previn was named CIO in 2017, succeeding Jeff Smith, who helped institute a culture of agile software development and sought to transform IBM's information-technology division by innovating as quickly as smaller companies, but with hundreds of thousands of employees.

Soon after Mr. Previn became CIO, he hired an executive reporting to him to oversee a team of dozens of people who design IT services while taking into account user research, workflow and metrics.

New employees expect that the IT services they use at work will be as good as or better than the technology they use at home, he said. To be competitive and attract talent, "we have to create an environment where talented engineers want to work," he added.

To that end, Mr. Previn and the design team have created new ways for employees to get and set up new devices. Device provisioning, or the act of assigning employees laptops, desktops and mobile phones with the appropriate encryption, email and productivity software, can be costly and time-consuming for IT departments.

Mr. Previn's user-research team oversaw a monthslong project in which they observed how much friction was involved for employees setting up their laptops. Many of the steps are now automated and cloud-based, similar to the way a consumer would be able to set up a device out of the box. "That's materially different from an experience standpoint," Mr. Previn said.

Another area that benefited from design thinking was the way in which employees get new devices. IBM staffers typically could order a new laptop every four years, but Mr. Previn's team found that only 30% of them responded to emails informing them they were due for a refresh -- many were fine using their existing computers.

The company decided to use its IBM Watson artificial-intelligence system to gauge the physical health of an employee's device, including its memory and operating system, to help predict hardware failure. That way, employees know whether their devices are in dire need of upgrades. Staffers can also order a new laptop anytime, Mr. Previn said.

"I see myself as an advocate for the IBM employee experience," Mr. Previn said.

IBM Chief Executive Ginni Rometty has said that methods such as design thinking have been used in the company's human resources and research and development groups.

"Design is a true discipline that can be applied to almost any problem," making technology simpler and easier to use, Ms. Rometty said in January.

IBM cut about 2,000 jobs this month amid moves to reshape its business to focus on high-value segments of the IT market, The Wall Street Journal has reported. In April, IBM reported its third consecutive quarter of declining revenue, as efforts to expand in cloud computing and artificial intelligence haven't been enough to offset slower growth in equipment sales and services.

Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 19, 2019 19:03 ET (23:03 GMT)

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