Importance of innovation

MC MCBAIN: Good morning. I’m MC McBain. I’m the Vice President of Global Business Development from IBM. I think the biggest challenge that we tend to face is the complexity of the relationships now, the interdependency of everyone around the world, and then, the need for speed. With the technology and mobile and the internet, everybody wants everything quicker and faster than ever before. And so the contract and commercial managements, you have to keep up and keep ahead in order to add value to the business. We were thinking that, as far as our contracts and commercial management, you want to listen for need, but you want to envision the future.

So it’s important that you use creativity, really hear what is being asked for, and then, sometimes, what people are asking for isn’t really necessarily what they need. And so you want to make sure that you can get underneath that a little bit. Listen carefully to the client. And then, have the opportunity to be creative and solve their problem. I think, sometimes, I think it’s important always to have an end-to-end contacting process. But what you really want is you want to process that facilitates the business objective and the outcome that you’re trying to achieve.

And so you really want to apply creativity, not as much about checking the box, but about really making the vision, the future vision, or whatever the project is, a reality and a success. I think IBM is always trying to reinvent. We’re always restlessly reinventing and thinking of new ways to do things. We were very pleased to receive our recent innovation award for our work with the cloud services agreement. So we’re always looking for simpler and easier ways for contracts and commercial management. When you think about it, the volume of data, with all the structured and unstructured data, the volume of it, and keeping up with it, is quite a lot.

And then, hopefully, people will be using technology to help them with those challenges.