Why Did IBM Develop the Open Talent Marketplace?

The Open Talent Marketplace offers IBM project teams a flexible, on-demand talent channel that increases agility in delivering software solutions. Before OTM, IBM generally staffed projects with dedicated project teams—employees who were assigned to work solely on a specific project. So, a complete project plan required assigning a sufficient number of people to all required roles on an ongoing basis. The work was contained in jobs and collected into one project team. While this provided dedicated staff, it meant that every project incurred the entire cost of each person, including additional costs associated with discontinuous work assignments, idle time, attrition, and retraining. During the project lifecycle, development workload fluctuates, but the cost of the dedicated team members remains the same regardless of output. When OTM is engaged for certain types of work on the project, the equivalent outcomes are developed at a fixed price and billed only when delivered successfully. No other costs are incurred for engaging teams. Project costs align directly with deliverable work output, and therefore talent costs do not accrue between development work cycles, resulting in “up to 50 percent lower cost of delivery for equivalent outcomes.”

When IBM needs talent for a project, OTM can often get exactly the talent they need, with costs incurred to the project only for the work performed. The project manager doesn't need to know who in the vast IBM organization has the skills to do the job and the time to do it; the OTM platform lets the person find the work.

OTM has enabled and inspired IBM leaders to approach the work very differently while still taking into account local and regional requirements. Eric Bokelberg, IBM senior product manager, Smarter Workforce, said,

One IBM team needed to convert their enterprise application and information warehouse to a new product stack and framework. This complex application would normally have taken 12 months or more to complete with existing traditional employment. Instead, they built a “loyalty pool” of OTM players. The project team first marketed the opportunity to see which players were interested. They then ran a series of training events to get players up to speed with the application and validate their expertise. Within one month, the leaders had 11 players trained and engaged in the project—much faster than the traditional staffing process. The team built commitments from the players to stay engaged by providing a steady stream of events and distributing the work equitably across trained players. By running multiple parallel work streams staffed by workers with the right skills continually available, the team completed the conversion more than five months ahead of schedule and at a lower cost.¹

The benefits of OTM are not limited to IBM's internal work. IBM clients benefit directly by tapping the IBM talent platform. Eric Bokelberg said,

An insurance industry customer came to us with an urgent need for website testing. Their financial advisors relied on a “portfolio optimizer” web application built and supported by a local development company (not IBM). A new release was approaching, and they had no one to test it. The customer didn't know exactly when the test effort would be required but had no funding in their budget to keep a test team on standby. IBM offered the Open Talent Marketplace—running events on demand to first create the test cases and then execute them. The cost was so low that it was almost insignificant to the client and yet they were able to engage qualified skills right when they needed, ensure a quality release, and get the function out to their financial advisors with no delay.²

The Assignment: How Do IBM Managers Optimally Deconstruct and Combine Regular Work Outcomes with the Open Talent Marketplace?

OTM requires that project leaders at IBM become adept at deconstructing the assignment, properly distributing the right kind of work to the platform, and then reconstructing the work that remains so that it can be assigned to the regular employees on the team. As Eric Bokelberg said, “To effectively leverage this new model, project managers have to adapt, decomposing the project work into more discrete units and adopting corresponding planning and management strategies.”

It also requires creative and diligent attention to the internal boundaries between units, projects, and managers. As Eric Bokelberg described it, “The standard policy is that an employee's assigned responsibilities always take priority. Any time an employee registers for an event, his or her manager is notified. OTM events are—by design—very short in duration so that employees can accurately forecast their free cycles over the next week and determine if they have the bandwidth to participate.” In essence, IBM employees take the initiative to fill up any slow periods in their own unit by taking on a small project from some other unit, quite possibly for a client on the other side of the world. Managers become participants in leading the work that now falls outside the boundaries of their own unit and the regular employment relationships of their own workers.

IBM managers and HR leaders have developed a good sense of what kinds of assignments can be deconstructed. For example, on the one hand, the work of migrating an application from one technology to another is well suited to deconstruction because the requirements are well defined and it is easy to judge a successful outcome (i.e., the application now works on the new technology). On the other hand, where an assignment's success depends on a close-up understanding of a client's unique circumstances, it is better not to deconstruct or disperse that work.

Eric Bokelberg put it this way:

Alignment of demand forecasting and resource management is the key to success, and we've developed sophisticated models to achieve that. Most important is the ability to decompose work into defined, short-cycle outcomes coupled with the discipline to manage a project via delivery of those outcomes. Not all projects lend themselves to this model. Where it has been most successful is where project teams have actually architected their solutions to take advantage of OTM benefits—using widely known technologies to ensure resource availability, and developing templates for repeatable work that make it very easy to run large numbers of events. We think that this is a model that can be applied within other large enterprises, and we are exploring engagements where IBM helps client make it happen.³

IBM is a technology company, so it's not surprising that it first applied OTM to technology development work. However, IBM is finding that they can extend this expertise to other types of work with similar characteristics, such as graphic design, data entry, and document enhancement and translation.

The Reward: What Does the Open Talent Marketplace Do for IBM Employees?

An employee who participates in an OTM event does so in addition to his or her existing job responsibilities. Why would anyone take on extra work? Perhaps the most compelling reason is the chance to develop (and publicly demonstrate) new skills. IBM surveyed its participating employees and found that this was the highest-rated motivation for participating. This is not just for the pleasure of learning; skills are the currency of the IT world and having spent many years working in an area that has become technically obsolete is worth next to nothing. Digital reputation and recognition are essential elements for making this type of model work within the enterprise. Employees (and their managers) track their OTM digital reputation using “Blue Card,” a web application that is analogous to a baseball card. It includes a comprehensive history of outcomes delivered, skills demonstrated, points earned, and levels of achievement. In fact, even if an IBMer doesn't win a project (or doesn't bother to bid) OTM supports their development by giving them valuable insight on what skills are in demand.

OTM also provides an opportunity for employees to receive additional cash compensation as awards are distributed to top players (based on points earned) on a regular basis. However, an even greater motivation is the chance to work on interesting projects. Maybe an IBMer grew up in Indonesia and is eager to work on a project that is applicable to that country. Maybe he or she is interested in the future of cities and is keen to work on a smarter cities project. OTM challenges employees with the opportunity to challenge themselves and work on projects far beyond their daily job responsibilities.

The Organization: Optimizing across IBM's Permeable Boundary

The traditional view of organization has permeability dialed down, creating a distinct barrier between employees and outsiders. With OTM, IBM has dialed permeability up by extending the platform to free agents. It extends the opportunity to optimally lead the work by drawing on external workers when internal ones are not available. This is not done in a haphazard way: IBM has developed protocols for when and how to use OTM to engage internal versus external free agents. These include considerations of security, careful domain access, talent selection, and the type of work for which internal versus external workers are eligible.

Blue Talent Cloud: Temporary Jobs inside IBM

Blue Talent Cloud assigns IBMers from his or her existing country to another unit on a temporary basis (typically 2 to 12 months). The person doesn't relocate, although they may make visits to the other unit. A typical example would be where an IBM unit in emerging markets needs a specific kind of work performed for a limited time and doesn't have the skills required, but another unit in the major markets has extra capacity and an employee who does. The work remains constructed as a job, but it's possible to dial up dispersion and collaboration between business units to create work arrangements that provide unique experiences for employees and optimization opportunities for leaders.

For IBM, the Blue Talent Cloud creates efficiencies by matching excess demand for talent in one part of the organization with excess supply in another. As Andreas Hasse described it, “We leverage IBMers' experience to cover peaks and valleys in the need for talent. This is a particular advantage in growth markets, where high turnover in the IT industry is common or the time to develop needed expertise can take months or years. When you have an urgent need to provide certain expertise to the client, an experienced IBMer from another region can take on the job for a few months. This is often the difference between missing the opportunity and delivering it well. We can bring the latest technology to our clients without waiting for the developing region to be able to hire a regular full-time employee for the long term.” For IBM employees, the idea of actually moving to a new region might be daunting, but providing services on a short-term basis to other parts of the business allows them to understand the broader IBM business and specific local cultures. It provides some of the same development benefits an employee would from expatriate work without as much disruption.

Such assignments don't just happen; they require cross-boundary coordination and collaboration that the IBMer Assignment Agency provides. For example, when an employee in the Shanghai office unexpectedly took a short-term leave of absence, the Agency found an IBMer in Spain with the key skills needed. With few changes to working hours, their work-life preferences were met. Indeed, the assignment was so successful that, at the end of the quarter, the Spanish employee went to Shanghai to do the quarter-end accounting.

Relocating Workers: Dispersion with a Bit of Deconstruction

IBM's value proposition is to deliver great solutions from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. That can mean relocating workers temporarily or permanently. Bringing in an IBMer is usually preferable to hiring a newcomer because the IBMer already knows the IBM culture, they have satisfied all the IBM entry requirements, and they have honed their capabilities within IBM's system. In many organizations, relocation can be difficult and unsystematic, because the two units may not have an easy way to see each other's workers, they may describe similar jobs differently, or there may be no available “broker” to help optimize the desires of the employee and needs of the units that move the employee. In IBM, relocation is housed in the IBMer Assignment Agency because it can take lessons learned from its other programs to make relocation a better tool for optimizing the work. The IBMer Assignment Agency offers a database of talent where a leader can search for the skills needed in other IBM units. The Agency helps optimize a balance between development for the employee and capacity help for the units involved. With Agency coordination, the boundaries of the two units become more permeable and interlinked, imaginative development rewards are enhanced, and the assignment is understood in a common language for both units. The Assignment Agency not only maintains the database and tools to expedite relocation, it helps leaders make optimal decisions. For example, the manager providing the talent loses a valued worker, but the organization benefits by sending the worker to a role where he or she can add more value or have essential development experiences. The IBMer Assignment Agency helps with these trade-offs, smoothing the paths between organizational unit boundaries.

Temporarily Assigning IBM Employees to Clients (Zenith) and Business Partners (Champions for Growth)

In other chapters we described a number of alliances that allow organizations to exchange their employees, such as the partnership between Siemens and Disney or Khazanah trading of leaders between the companies in its investment portfolio. The IBMer Assignment Agency includes two programs to assign IBM employees temporarily to other organizations. One program focuses on clients (called Zenith) and the other on business partners (called Champions for Growth). Both programs make IBM's work boundary more permeable, interlinked and collaborative. They allow IBMers to tap into imaginative rewards such as experiences with clients or business partners that IBM might not be able to offer, and the chance to build relationships and even future career paths to other organizations. For IBM, its employees gain unique experience working directly with an outside client or partner so that when they return they are even better ambassadors to those valued clients and partners.

For example, a client may say, “We know that your financial professionals in IBM have profound knowledge about how finance should be executed in an organization that relies on technology, cloud computing, and solution development. Our strategy is evolving in that direction, and we need a CFO who has deep experience in those areas.” A traditional organization might think of this only in terms of regular full-time employment; with that model, the only way to satisfy the request is to lose a great employee, so most organizations would discourage it. That's a lost opportunity, especially when there may be financial professionals between assignments who would love the chance to take a temporary stint with a client or a business partner. A temporary talent exchange can be a win for IBM, the client, and the IBMer.

The IBMer Assignment Agency enables such opportunities by making IBM's boundary more collaborative, in part by deconstructing the work into a language that both the outside organization and IBM can use to accurately match workers to the work. It maintains the work as collected in a job and attached to employment, but it disperses it outside IBM's boundary to its client and partner organizations. That requires providing a governance structure that can figure out issues of accountability, protecting intellectual property, and how to translate performance assessments between the two organizations. The outside organization pays IBM for the worker, so the outside organization has a tangible economic incentive to put the person in a significant role.

IBM's goal is to bring the workers back, now armed with their new experiences, but if the worker and the outside company want them to stay, the Agency works out the transition. As Andreas Hasse said, “The majority of these folks work at the other company for two or three years, and they wear that company's employment badge while they work there. We always assume they will return, but if they choose to join the other company permanently, then we know we have placed in that client or partner a person that will help them grow in ways that make IBM's services more valuable and relevant, so it can make a significant improvement in the amount and duration of business IBM does with them.”

An example of imaginative rewards involved Deloitte, the global consulting organization. Deloitte saw an opportunity to expand its software sales in Belgium. The best workers with the capability to expand those sales were employed by IBM. Deloitte is an IBM business partner, so the IBMer Assignment Agency worked out the secondment. The IBMer, now working at Deloitte, developed ways to use deeper business analytics to support Deloitte's endeavors, coincidentally extending Deloitte's use of IBM software and services.

Creating Synergy and Optimization: The Lessons of Governance and Coordination

IBM enables its managers to lead the work by creating an internal ecosystem that reaches beyond regular full-time employment. The IBMer Assignment Agency has faced challenges and developed solutions to some thorny issues. We have seen in other chapters that those issues have already started to arise in the outside world, as organizations tap the broader external ecosystem of platforms, alliances, partners, and free agents. Because the agency operates internally within IBM, it has a good deal of experience with challenges that are still just emerging in the external ecosystem. Certainly, solving those issues within one company is different from solving them in an external ecosystem of independent entities, but the techniques used by the IBMer Assignment Agency are valuable examples for organizations navigating the broader ecosystem beyond employment. Not everyone who applies gets an assignment, and not every assignment gets filled. It requires skill at matching work opportunities to the best of the programs, and skill at recruiting and assigning workers to the right opportunities.

One of the most important tools of the IBMer Assignment Agency is a single database where opportunities from a system called the Global Opportunity Marketplace and information from a registration site for IBMers are stored. Workers can actively search the Marketplace for opportunities, but often busy IBMers prefer to register their profile on the system so that it can present appropriate opportunities to them as they arise. As registered IBMers go through cycles of considering and accepting or rejecting opportunities, the Agency learns their preferences by analyzing their clients' transactions. Over time the Agency offers IBMers opportunities that are more exact matches, based on what the system has learned about their choices.

The matching, as one might expect from IBM, uses sophisticated algorithms and fuzzy logic. However, there is a crucial human element. Human analysts in the IBMer Assignment Agency examine the matches that are returned by the system to check whether they are a good-quality match. It's a constant endeavor to improve the matching process, to minimize offering workers something they reject, or offering clients a person they don't accept. IBM draws upon its own tools of artificial intelligence and a vast library of skills and competencies. As the scale of the Agency grows, it automates processes such as communication with candidates and managers, but again it's an artful combination of using machine learning to assist the human capability. Christiane Schuetz is an IBM communications leader whose job is to humanize the communication and matching process, to get the advantages of automation and predictive analytics, but avoid the “cold feel” of an exclusively computer-based mathematical algorithm.

Finally, because almost all of the Agency's assignments are undertaken with the assumption that the person will return to IBM, or return within IBM to their original role, the Agency has developed a system of after-care for its assignees. That means that employees' performance on their assignments are tracked in a language that can be understood and compared to past and future assignments. It means keeping them in touch with IBM, particularly on long assignments with clients or partners so that they stay connected to IBM culture, strategy, challenges, and networks. The Agency leaders want to make sure that no IBMer is left behind, so they make sure to include them in team meetings, career fairs, and other bonding experiences.

Found in Translation: A Common Language of Work

“What we've got here is a failure to communicate,” is the classic line from the movie Cool Hand Luke, where Paul Newman is working on the chain gang. A failure to communicate about the work people do may not be as dramatic as in the movies, but it can be an increasingly important barrier to achieving your organization's mission. It's relatively easy to understand the skills of the regular full-time employees in your own department. But what if you are using services like the IBMer Assignment Agency to tap talent from across the IBM world and beyond? How can you accurately communicate which skills you need, and how can you accurately assess what skills other people have?

Just as accounting and finance provide a common language about money that allows it to move between organizations, a world beyond employment increasingly requires a common language so that work can move efficiently between organizations, or even between positions within a single organization.

Perhaps the most vivid example of the limitations of today's language of work is the challenge facing organizations from Walmart to Starbucks who wish to hire military veterans. The military language of work doesn't map well onto private-sector jobs. To help address the issue, the U.S. Department of Labor provides a “crosswalk” to translate between military occupational specialties (MOS) and civilian language. Search the word “analyst” in the Air Force and you get a long list of “interpreters and translators.” Search the word “leader” and you get a list of jobs called “architectural and engineering managers.” When organizations borrow talent, as Siemens did when it allied with Disney employees to market its children's hearing aid, they rely largely on the partner organizations' language of their workers' qualifications and capabilities. When you get workers from an agency or consulting firm, you rely on their language to describe what the workers can do. Often, these organizations have a very different language for the same work, just like the different military branches. If there is a failure to communicate, then the match of task to talent will be poor.

Clients feel pretty sure IBM must have a solution to their technical problems. Clients say, “You have a vast network of employees and contractors; you must be able to find someone among them to solve my problem.” The clients are not wrong, but it is a significant challenge to identify the right person. IBM has made it possible to find the right person by creating a five-layer taxonomy of 20,000 distinct skills, as well as introducing more advanced methods (a folksonomy) to keep up-to-date information on who has what skills.

You might think the size of the taxonomy, not to mention the folksonomy (which we discuss further in a moment), would make it difficult to navigate. Surprisingly, Andreas Hasse says, “It's pretty simple: I just tap into the database of the IBMer Assignment Agency that contains all the requisitions and all the candidates. An interface prompts managers who have work needs to answer a set of relevant questions. It prompts IBM employees to answer a set of questions about what they can do, what they want to do, and when they are available. We need to ask them only a few questions because we can pull everything else from the human resource information warehouse (HRIW). I don't need a complex set of commands or database queries; I just use natural language to ask for what I need.”

The value of a sophisticated and ever-evolving language system for work is an important lesson for leaders who hope to get more creative in matching assignments to talent within their own organization, but perhaps even more significant for workers, managers, and citizens who will need to navigate a world of work beyond traditional employment. Building and maintaining the taxonomy is not a small or a one-time project: IBM's Expertise Taxonomy is built, maintained, and developed with 75 employees. Anne Lake, who heads the Expertise Taxonomy, expressed the big idea: “as we perfect the system, a business leader will tell the system what they want done in their own words, and the system tells the leader who can do it, it tells IBMers what they need to develop to be qualified, and if IBM doesn't have a matching skill, it can help the manager locate a freelancer or outside employee.”

The limitation of a taxonomy is that new skills are constantly being created (e.g., skills around a brand-new programming language), and people are constantly acquiring new skills. How do you keep everything up to date? To address this problem, IBM leverages an interactive mobile app codeveloped with the IBM software and research teams called the IBM Expertise Locator. The system is increasingly using data-mining techniques to analyze the data that naturally occurs as people do their work, and it infers the skills and expertise depth of the employees through advanced algorithms. This app captures the expertise of every employee through their digital footprint to highlight their skills, knowledge, experience, network, and contributions to other employees. It further differentiates experts by using social business capabilities based on those who share and surface their expertise to connect with others, which fuels innovation, decreases response times, and delivers a differentiated client experience. Thousands of global IBMers searching for expertise via the app creates a folksonomy that empowers the organization to gain visibility of current and up-and-coming market skill needs and trends, ultimately informing updates to the taxonomy.