IBM 2020

Abstract

This business case presents IBM's turnaround strategy applied by its current CEO Arvind Krishna who replaced the former CEO Virginia Rometty in 2020 to help IBM regain competitive advantage in the cloud market which is dominated by early movers who established themselves as trusted cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The beginning of the case highlights the points of strengths of IBM that enabled it to become a tech giant for longer than a century, then it illustrates the problems IBM encountered from 2012 till 2020 during Rometty's tenure of declining revenues and losing market share due to its slow response to digital trend, late entry to the cloud market and lacking the vision and strategy to compete with dominant players which led to replacing Rometty by Arvind Krishna as CEO, then as chairman of IBM.Afterwards, the case demonstrates Arvind's strategies to fix that problem by applying changes to IBM's strategy, structure, staff, skills, systems, and style in compliance with IBM shared values of innovation, trust and dedication to client’s success. Moreover, it will apply balanced scorecard analysis of the results of these strategies by analyzing the financial performance, customers experience, improvement in business operations, learning and growth. Furthermore, it will evaluate if the protagonist succeeded in fixing the declining revenues problem and his plans to sustain IBM's competitive advantage in the future through strategic partnerships and exploring other ventures like Quantum Computing and Nanotechnology besides his main focus on hybrid cloud and Artificial intelligence. Through this case study, business school students will gain insights into the complexities of leading companies through a period of transformation, and they will understand the importance of adapting to emerging technologies and leveraging them to drive growth and regain market relevance.

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