According to a 2021 IBM Institute for Business Value survey, nearly 60% of businesses said they needed to accelerate their digital transformation due to COVID-19 to survive and thrive.

IBM is dedicated to helping companies remove the barriers that hinder that digital transformation, and one of the ways it’s helping clients do this is through concepts like intelligent workflows and the IBM Garage Methodology.

Dominique Dubois (pictured, left), global strategies and offerings leader at IBM, and Paul Pappas (pictured, right), global managing partner of business transformation services at IBM, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during IBM Think. They discussed IBM’s utilization of intelligent workflows in digital transformation, as well as the IBM Garage Methodology. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

How is IBM helping customers address … the urgent need to survive and thrive with respect to digital transformation through intelligent workflows? 

Dubois: Workflows in and of themselves are basically how organizations get work done, but intelligent workflows are how we infuse predictive properties, automation, transparency, agility end-to-end across a workflow. Intelligent workflows are really made up of three core elements. The first is around better utilizing data — so aggregating, analyzing, getting deeper insight out of data. [And then the second is] using that insight not just for employees to make better decisions, but actually to support for emerging technologies to leverage. So we talked about AI, automation, IoT, blockchain. All of these technologies require vast amounts of data, and what we’re able to bring — both on the internal and external source from a data perspective — really underpins what these emerging technologies can do.

The third area is skills — our skills that we bring to the table, but also our clients’ deep, deep expertise … from the ecosystem at large. And pulling all of that together is how we’re really able to help our clients accelerate their digital transformations.

Clients can get 50 to 70% more value from the use of intelligent workflows, so that just shows that fundamental impact that intelligent workflows can make.

Dubois: When I think intelligent workflows I think acceleration. I think exponential value. But I also really think about at scale. Because it’s really the ability to apply these technologies, the expertise at scale that allows us to start to unlock a lot of that value.

Talk to me a little bit about what the IBM Garage Method is and how this is helping clients to really transform those workflows. Help us understand what that is and how it’s delivering value to customers.

Pappas: I do want to key in on two words that Dominique was mentioning: speed and scale. Because that’s what our clients are really looking for when they’re doing transformations around intelligent workflows. How can you transform at scale but do that with speed? And that really becomes the critical issue. There’s a lot of companies that can help you do a proof of concept, do something in a few weeks that you can test an idea out and have something that’s kind of like a throw-away piece of work that maybe proves a point. But even if it does prove the point, at that point you’d have to restart anew to try to get something that you could actually scale either in the production technology environment or scale as a change across an organization.

And that’s where IBM Garage comes in. It’s all a way of helping our clients co-create, co-execute and then cooperate innovating at scale. So we use methods like design thinking. Inside of IBM we’ve trained several hundred thousand people on design thinking methods. We use technologies like neural and other things that help our clients co-create in a dynamic environment. And what’s amazing for me is that because of the way we were, we were doing work with clients … using IBM Garage … before the pandemic. And what was great is that we were able to quickly adapt the Garage Method to working in a virtual world.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE