Weathering the Storm

In August 1992, Hurricane Andrew hit Miami and wiped out two thirds of my house and a good chunk of South Florida. While a terrible experience that took years for some to fully recover, hurricanes and most other natural disasters have a small geographic and population impact with a definitive beginning and end. During the first 60 days in my new role, a lot of time has been spent around a new type of natural disaster, the likes none of us have ever seen before, worldwide and with no definitive end… COVID-19. In the best of times, starting a new role is a challenge as you learn the business, meet the team, partners and clients, and understand what steady state looks like. You would think the last 30 days was anything but steady state, which in some ways is true, but for the Technology Support Services (TSS) team, COVID-19 has actually highlighted what our men and women do day-to-day in a humble, determined, and selfless way.

30 days ago, COVID-19 was a public health crisis, predominantly in China, emerging in Italy and Spain, but it would soon take the world by storm and fundamentally move everyone to a new abnormal of most sheltering-in-place, many carefully getting to their essential jobs, and all of us wearing masks wherever you go. For the TSS team, we learned and adapted immediately in China, where it all began. It took us about two weeks to fully adapt (a pattern we then replicated country by country as the pandemic spread) changing how we engage with clients from predominantly face-to-face to video conference, minimizing physical presence at client locations for physical repairs of mission-critical systems, implementing new safety procedures, and ultimately scaling virtually all of IBM to work from home. The last part we’re mostly all familiar with, but not at a scale of 350,000 people all at once. 

What we found in our early experience in China were countless examples of our teams going above and beyond the call of duty to serve our clients. One example was our team fixing hardware & software for machines needed to assess patients at hospitals in Wuhan and other provinces during the peak of the pandemic. Another was an IBMer walking more than 30 KM between hospitals when public transportation shut down in order to install self-service machines, without which the hospital would have run out of supply. Yet another team member canceled their vacation to then travel across the country to work ten straight days to help another hospital. All of these actions ultimately had a direct impact on saving lives… not something most of us can say on a regular basis within the technology industry, but very proud they did.

As the pandemic spread beyond China and into Europe, not only did we have the virus to deal with, but then an earthquake hit Croatia on March 22nd, the biggest in more than 140 years. We had team members without homes, vehicles or normal methods of communication, yet once again the team rallied, came up with a plan on that Sunday to work through and around the latest new abnormal and ultimately maintained continuous service to our clients without missing a beat.  

As the disease spread across the Atlantic Ocean, we adapted our procedures in the U.S. to protect our employees during in-home repairs. That led to an IBMer going out of his way to meet an Australian family on holiday in the U.S. in a motor home so that their main source of communication back home, a laptop, could be fixed. At a government agency who had restricted data center access to their own essential personnel only, we leveraged our augmented reality technology on the fly to walk the client’s team through a hardware repair after dropping off the requisite parts at the door and maintaining quarantine. Further South, in Mexico, we had a telecommunications client who was going through a mission critical application migration just as COVID-19 was beginning to accelerate. Seven IBMers spent two straight weeks on-site, leaving their families to shelter-in-place and alternating 12 hour shifts to help the client accomplish their goals in spite of COVID-19. 

I could go on and on with anecdotes from around the world where the TSS team has achieved phenomenal results, but at the macro level, the numbers also support the stories. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) for January through March went up an astounding 6 points, on top of an already industry leading performance, getting ever closer to the magical ‘perfect 100’ we strive for. All the while, as I speak with our teams, the response is consistent… “I don’t see what the big deal is, I was just doing my job”. 

All of this is happening within my slice of #IBM, while the broader company is helping leverage technology to address COVID-19, whether it be launching the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, joining the Emer2gent alliance of data analytics experts finding new, faster ways of supporting businesses and governments globally as they recover from the economic impacts of COVID-19 or teaming with Lady Gaga and the World Health Organization with the CallforCode to address COVID-19 challenges. 

What I’ve learned over these past 60 days on the job, is I am truly privileged to be working with and inspired every day by the men and women who support the world’s hybrid cloud, regardless of the challenge thrown in front of them. At a time when nearly every country is being impacted by COVID-19, with over 2.4 million cases worldwide and the numbers continuing to climb daily, we are working tirelessly to help our clients weather the impact of COVID-19 and keep their businesses going, no matter what, and we won’t stop.  We’re working through the storm, rebuilding on the fly as we look forward to blue skies once again.