The process of reinvention at IBM has included a total overhaul of strategy, operations and culture for its 300,000 global employees. Joseph Selle (pictured), global advanced analytics and cognitive transformation lead at IBM, is enthusiastic about the positive changes — and those still to come — within the organization.

“We’re transforming the company from the inside out,” Selle said. His approach has been to reinforce every team at IBM with new tech tools for full optimization. “We’re engaging with all of the functional areas within IBM’s operations, and we’re challenging those functional teams to break down their business process and reinvent it using some new tooling. In this case, it’s cognitive approaches to data analysis and crowdsourcing information,” he said.

Selle spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit event in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed IBM’s strategies for engaging its entire employee base in reinvention, as well as what other companies in the space can do to ensure they remain competitive as tech continues to evolve. (* Disclosure below.)

Rebuilding processes from the ground up

Making company-wide changes at IBM’s scale requires a full commitment to growth — and a lot of creativity. The challenge: getting the entire company thinking about a large-scale enterprise, cultural transformation, Selle explained.

“We had a cognitive jam, basically a technology-enabled brainstorm session, that spread across the entire globe,” Selle said.

By engaging 300,000 IBM’ers worldwide, Selle and his team were able to cultivate the kind of disruptive ideas necessary to creating change at that level. “We ended up with a few [ideas] that were really worthy of investment. We put money in, and our cognitive reinvention was born,” he said.

The company’s efforts have already resulted in a measurable impact on the business at large. “We’ve been able to take jobs that involve a lot of churning analysis and say … ‘What used to take you six hours … we can shrink that down using a cognitive tool to just a few minutes,’” Selle said.

IBM’s shifts have also had a positive effect on optimized human resource work and even more efficient mergers and acquisitions processes within the company. With the entire organization primed for a new era of innovation, IBM is looking forward to continuing to create an impact on the industry, Selle stated.

“We’re building a cognitive enterprise data platform. We’re taking all of these point solutions … [and] bringing them together onto a platform and applying some common tooling to all of these common types of problems around data organization, and governance, and metadata tagging — and all this geeky stuff that you have to be able to do if you’re going to make any value,” he said.

IBM’s journey can also provide insights for other companies hoping to embark down this path. “You don’t want to try to boil the ocean at the start. … Go in there and solve a few problems. … Once you’ve done that … you begin to learn how to handle the problem more generally, and you can distill approaches and tools that can then be applied broadly,” Selle concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. Neither IBM, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE