Top MBAs & Computer
Science Majors Win at IBM
by Dorothy Davis
To feel buoyantly optimistic about the future of our country,
about Yankee ingenuity and creative U. S. industry, and the
outstanding students our schools are producing-uplifting things
like that-you can't do better these days than to take a peek
at IBM! Yes, that stodgy old company of our youth (well, mine
anyway) has been busy reinventing itself. We took a new look
at them at a recent press conference, which they had called
to introduce us to the doings of the 20 North American standouts
of their 6th Annual Extreme Blue intern program.
The students, top MBA candidates
and Computer Science majors, 200 of them in all worldwide,
were chosen from a competitive field of 4,500 high caliber
entrants. "The winners are
the Michael Jordans, the Tiger Woods, the best of the best!" said
Jane Harper, Director of IBM's Talent Programs. "IBM," she
said, "began their competitive program in 1999 when heavy
duty talent wars were going on, during the highly competitive
dot com era. Top graduates wanted to work for the start-up
companies, rather than for IBM. We had to do something!"
What they did was come up with "Extreme Blue," an
innovative, highly competitive intern program combining projects,
people, places and a Wow! experience. The projects are important
ones, requested by IBM employees, needed solutions that will
change the world. The people are some of the brightest people
from universities, and top people from IBM. The places are
intellectually stimulating cities, and labs that are absolutely
state of the art, so the winning students can walk in the door
and start working immediately. The Wow! comes from being able
to spend time going rock climbing, sky diving, or enjoying
other exciting activities.
Here are some of this year's extraordinary
results from the five North American labs. Some of
them were developed over only one summer.
1. IBM Almaden Lab: Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)-A Solution
for Financial Services
Say you're a banker about to approve a big loan. How do you
figure out the risk and therefore the interest? In the past
you could only get static week-old information about the loans
your institution had made. But what if three minutes ago, unbeknownst
to you, a huge loan had been granted in the same high-risk
field? You'd be on the brink of overextending your company
and charging too little interest. With BAM you can check your
computer and find out about any of your company's transactions
three minutes after they're made in enough detail to monitor
your risk level in all areas.
2. IBM Cambridge Lab: BizMatch-Helping IBM Sales Professionals
Better Leverage Its 90,000 Business Partners (BP)
A Match.com for IBM's BPs. In quick response to a series of
simple questions and answers up pops a short list of companies
who can provide exactly what another client company needs-a
market, product, service, whatever. An instantaneous connection
between companies that benefits them both.
3. IBM Toronto Lab: Symbiosis-New Testing Tool for Problem
Determination
A downed company Website can be up and running again in record
time. With Symbiosis they can just turn to their computers,
which are fed diagnostic information from the Website, to speedily
analyze the problem and repair it.#
For further information about IBM's Extreme Blue and their
other innovative programs see www.ibm.com/extremeblue.
