ARMONK, N.Y., June 28, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that more than 500 businesses around the world have chosen the IBM Garage to help them power their digital reinventions with hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence (AI). Companies including ADP, Cemex, the Kraft Heinz Company and the Government of Nova Scotia are leveraging the IBM Garage to help create cultures of open collaboration and continuous learning and to drive lasting business outcomes.

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As companies continue to drive digital reinvention, more of their mission-critical business applications and workloads are shifting to the cloud so they can build, adopt and scale AI while also becoming more agile and responsive to changing market and client demands. While this is creating great opportunity to fuel innovation, it is also creating the need to transform workflows across a hybrid cloud environment and change their culture as they apply new technologies.

The IBM Garage has helped businesses rapidly move from idea generation to enterprise scale adoption as they introduce new revenue streams and business models, transform workflows and reinvent customer experiences for the era of hybrid cloud and AI. Additionally, the IBM Garage accelerates how clients unlock insights and business outcomes by helping them to modernize existing applications with advanced cloud services like AI, blockchain and IoT.

"In the next chapter of digital reinvention, the ability to innovate at scale will be the difference between success and failure – this requires a fundamental shift in how companies work," said Mark Foster, Senior Vice President, IBM Services and Global Business Services. "For the incumbents of the world, who we believe have a major advantage in their proprietary data and decades of industry specific expertise, the ability to adopt hybrid cloud strategies and quickly shift to new ways of working will allow them to beat the so-called digital disruptors of the last decade. The IBM Garage is our approach to help them drive purposeful innovation and transformational change at the speed of a start-up and at the scale of an enterprise – fast tracking their journeys to become Cognitive Enterprises enabled by the hybrid cloud."

Through the combination of the right people, applied technology and new ways of working, the IBM Garage can help businesses jumpstart innovation by tapping into technologies like AI, automation and blockchain on the cloud into the context of customer journeys, critical workflows, pain points and value potential. Teams of IBM professionals with diverse expertise – across research, strategy, process, application and infrastructure – sit shoulder-to-shoulder with clients to develop new ideas, prove adoption and business case with a minimum viable product (MVP) then advance that MVP into day-to-day operations and workflows.

The method also incorporates Enterprise Design Thinking, is built for Agile principles for co-located and distributed teams and leverages DevOps tools and techniques for continued delivery and operations. In collaborative spaces designed to be a break from the everyday, traditional silos are eliminated and participants are encouraged to learn by doing, fail fast and iterate often, inspiring organizational change and buy-in. 

Through a new Innovation Hub, IBM can now extend the IBM Garage experience to provide clients with access to the breadth and depth of IBM Research innovation through specialized teams, which are dedicated to transforming innovative ideas into direct client business value. An integrated squad of research scientists, developers and domain experts works closely with clients to complement mature and tested IBM Services assets with potentially game-changing IBM Research innovation assets. The innovation hub can also leverage a hybrid cloud AI environment for fast and agile innovation that is easily transferable to a client environment.

In the past 18 months, IBM has helped more than 500 leading global companies as they drive digital transformations with data and AI on the cloud, and seek to move rapidly beyond minimum viable products (MVP) to deliver lasting business results, including: 

• Human capital management cloud and services company ADP uses the IBM Garage method as it looks to infuse AI across the enterprise. ADP and IBM jointly developed an AI-powered digital agent that handles over 20 percent of ADP's chat traffic that helped drive NPS scores to all-time highs. Today, ADP continues to work with IBM Garage to help create its digital on-boarding process, streamlining and enhancing their new clients' first impressions.
• At CEMEX, an early adopter of IBM Garage, the CEMEX Go digital platform grew to 96% of the company's total recurring customers in just 19 months
• At Brazilian company eLaw, a cloud-based cognitive service allows lawyers to analyze, compare and interpret cases faster and with 15% more accuracy.
• The Government of Nova Scotia and IBM built a working prototype of the connected automated external defibrillator (AED) system using IoT so its citizens can reliably locate an AED the moment it is needed, resulting in an ROI seven to 10 times their investment.
• Construction company Mueller, Inc. worked with the IBM Garage to co-create an app on IBM Cloud that lets contractors get real-time project and product quotes on site rather than go through days of paperwork.

"In seven weeks, the IBM Garage helped us rewrite the way that we have been structuring inventory data for 20 years," said Mark Lack, Manager of Strategy, Analytics and Business Intelligence, Mueller, Inc. "We've already seen 60% NPS from contractors using the app and believe this will likely serve as a key differentiator for our customers going forward. The result had been so successful, we are implementing the Garage method in developing all strategic initiatives."

Fast-tracking human centered design

Building on this momentum, IBM now offers two courses to help more businesses innovate while moving to the cloud, execute and operate at scale and fast-track AI adoption.

The IBM Garage Methodology is available to businesses digitally today through the IBM Garage Method for Cloud course. The course introduces innovative practices centered around cultural change, Enterprise Design Thinking, test driven development, operational excellence, and continuous learning. Guiding teams to use the tools and services needed to put these practices in action, it is designed to change the way teams work, helping them understand issues and challenges so they can rapidly deliver high-quality solutions. To date, 10,000 IBM employees and clients have earned digital badges in the IBM Garage course.

AI adoption is growing significantly as enterprises shift from AI experimentation to innovation and transformation at scale. To help clients navigate this change, IBM experts created Team Essentials for AI. This nine-lesson course can be delivered as part of IBM Garage engagements and is part of a suite of courses for IBM Enterprise Design Thinking,  to help companies build and scale ethical AI throughout their workflows and where teams can learn how to be more creative, productive and practical in their approach while developing solutions that are transparent and socially responsible. For individual users, the first of five proficiency levels will be free through July 31, after which Team Essentials for AI will be offered as part of IBM's entire Enterprise Design thinking curriculum ($300 per year).

About IBM:
For more information about IBM Services, visit https://www.ibm.com/services.

For more information about the IBM Garage, visit https://www.ibm.com/garage.

Media Contact:

Marisa Conway
IBM Media Relations
conwaym@us.ibm.com

SOURCE IBM