“Probably no surprise to people that know me is that culture is very important to me. When you have a founder of a company, the culture is very much a reflection of the values of the founder, and that’s always been the case at Resource,” she says.
Kramer carefully vetted her potential buyers before settling on IBM. She included others in the process, and it wasn’t just the CEO and CFO who she asked to weigh in. She would ask: “Are they a cultural fit? Are they a values fit? Are they a work fit?”
“It had nothing to do with the financial situation or any of that. It was all based on the culture and the work, and I think that that approach really paid off,” Kramer says.
She literally had a scorecard to keep track of what each person privately said about the various companies that Resource was considering becoming a part of.
After the sale, Kramer has focused on integrating the business into IBM iX. She’s been part of the effort to build IBM iX’s services and offerings, while determining how they merge with the work that’s historically been done in the legacy Resource group.
One change is the scale of the clients — it’s truly global Fortune 100 companies, Kramer says. The Resource team also spends more time at the clients’ sites, like traditional consultants.
“Their horizons have been expanded,” she says of the legacy employees. “The breadth and depth of the work that they’re doing has been expanded tremendously, by deploying things like artificial intelligence and machine learning and blockchain and quantum computing and all the wonderful things that IBM is developing that we simply on our own did not have access to.”
Education has increased in order to be able to work with clients on new technologies, such as using blockchain to quickly trace food products to their source to improve food safety. For example, Kramer says a group of 100 mostly legacy employees recently went through three days of training.
“That’s the exciting part of us becoming part of IBM. I can’t think that there’s ever been a more challenging time to be in business, but there’s also never been a greater opportunity,” Kramer says.
Find the common ground
In addition to changes on the macro level with clients, who’ve learned about the expanded capabilities of an IBM iX company, the business went through internal changes. Kramer says becoming part of a large organization is a very different operational model, which has seemed a bit like drinking from a fire hose.
“It’s primarily systems and processes and approvals and that sort of thing, and I’m no longer the leader who can just say ‘Go do this and here’s the budget for that,’ which is to be expected,” she says.
Nothing has been surprising, Kramer says. It’s just a matter of adjusting to things like how resources are deployed, the way the company does accounting and the way communication flows through the organization.
Like any relationship, it takes effort to build a cohesive team. The biggest barometer Kramer uses to determine priorities is “clients first” because clients rule in a service business.
“That’s always been the case here, but I think it’s been a little bit more challenging as part of IBM because you have so many different competing priorities,” she says.
A weekly 10 a.m. Monday meeting with the North American team, however, gives everyone a chance to discover what’s going on with all the clients and opportunities. Kramer believes this meeting not only starts the week off right and keeps everybody focused, it also helps each studio learn about everybody’s skills and who excels at what. That knowledge has come organically through experience as well, by going to client meetings together, etc.
“It’s just like any relationship. It’s got to start with finding things that you’ve got common ground on,” she says.
