Thread regarding IBM layoffs

good article - thanks for posting it below - i thought it was 30 bucks to read and then i saw your post @vti many thanks.

1dwx. This is the IBM way. Keep right sizing until it makes sense to spin off. Look at the Intel servers. We went thru 4 rounds of layoffs until Lenovo said “sure we’ll take it”. Services is now going thru the same game plan. Keep right sizing until someone says OK we’ll take it. My guess is Bain will say yes soon to IBM’s offer. Bain sees value in the IBM body shop work, as they already have a body shop company set up in India. Just merging the two entities is far easier if the overlap has already been done

The layoff of Watson Health is just a tip of iceberg. Many businesses in IBM are withering & dieing.

There would be RA storm this year！

"Former employees described confusion within the merged units of the company...."

Current employees would tell you the same thing, The constant reorganizations and layoffs has everybody wondering what our job now is. The last layoff was so big we're all making up lists of things we can't do any more. I wonder if anyone in high management will look at those lists. Some teams are so reduced that their mission is now impossible. I wonder if anyone in high management knows or cares. With 70% cut due to layoff, the other 30% will be cut for failing do the impossible.

At RSNA last year I saw a demo of a Watson Health "Imaging" product that had nothing whatsoever to do with imaging. The Clinical Review product reviews EHR data, not images. Obviously they were so desperate to get product out the door they slapped the "imaging" label on a product that was anything BUT an imaging product. This distinction was lost on the Sales Robots and VP types pitching to us.

"...in the hope that its vaunted Watson supercomputer could mine that information...".

Where on the list of top supercomputers does the "Watson Supercomputer" come? Do people still believe that Watson is actually a supercomputer as opposed to just being the name given to some services that run in the IBM Cloud?

This kind of sums it up:

"The problems related to the company’s acquisitions appear to be broader. Former employees described confusion within the merged units of the company and a failure to integrate them technically or culturally into Watson Health, the division of IBM charged with developing and selling health products based on Watson’s artificial intelligence capabilities."

Here is the article:

'IBM’s problems with Watson Health run deeper than recent layoffs, former employees say', abstract: 'It was an expensive gamble. IBM spent billions acquiring a trio of companies with vast stores of patient health data, in the hope that its vaunted Watson supercomputer could mine that information for business and clinical insights to sell to U.S. hospitals. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

IBM laid off Watson Health employees across the country last month who were tasked with turning that bold ambition into new revenue for the technology giant.

Layoffs are typical after a spate of acquisitions, but STAT interviews with former IBM employees suggest that Watson Health is grappling with a deeper problem - that the company has struggled to turn its new trove of patient data into workable products, and that instead of attracting a wave of new hospital clients, Watson Health is starting to shed business.

_We were losing a lot of clients and we hadn’t merged the [data] assets that could have created a really impressive market, said one employee who left the company recently. _Things just sort of spiraled out of control from there. Clients were fed up. We couldn’t meet their needs anymore.

Two other former employees provided similar explanations of the challenges IBM faced bringing together different sets of data it acquired. All asked for anonymity out of concern that publicly criticizing a past employer would damage their careers or relationships with former colleagues.

The extent of the layoffs carried out in late May remains unclear, as IBM has declined to provide exact numbers. But many fell on employees who were brought into IBM through its acquisitions of Explorys, Phytel, and Truven Health - three companies that were expected to give Watson access to data on tens of millions of patients and expand the company’s capabilities in health care. The layoffs hit offices in Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Ann Arbor, Mich., and elsewhere.

A spokeswoman for IBM provided a statement saying the layoffs affected a ____small percentage of our global Watson Health workforce.

_IBM is continuing to reposition our team to focus on the high-value segments of the IT market, the statement said, _and we continue to hire aggressively in critical new areas that deliver value for our clients and IBM.

The spokeswoman, Christine Douglass, also referred a reporter to a report by an equity analyst from Morgan Stanley suggesting that the layoffs are part of restructuring that typically follows large acquisitions. The report noted that IBM went on a buying spree in 2015 and 2016, spending about $9 billion on acquisitions over those two years, compared to just $3.7 billion in the preceding two-year period.

A STAT investigation published last September found that Watson Health was having trouble with one of its lead products, Watson for Oncology, which is designed to help doctors individualize cancer care. The product was struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer and to gain traction in the market. At foreign hospitals, it had generated complaints that its advice was biased toward American patients and methods of care.

The problems related to the company’s acquisitions appear to be broader. Former employees described confusion within the merged units of the company and a failure to integrate them technically or culturally into Watson Health, the division of IBM charged with developing and selling health products based on Watson’s artificial intelligence capabilities.

The employees said there was never clear agreement, for example, on how to merge data gathered by the three companies into a unified format that could be used by Watson. That made it more difficult to deliver insights to help hospitals target medical services to specific patients, cut costs, and improve the quality of care.

_Our technology was being oversold and we were underperforming in our ability to deliver on our contracts and obligations, one former employee said. _It seemed more often than not we would make excuses.

Explorys, Phytel, and Truven were acquired by IBM as part of a cluster of acquisitions in 2015 and 2016. Each had separate attributes and goals, but all carried significant amounts of patient data.

Explorys, a spinoff of the Cleveland Clinic, boasted one of the largest clinical data sets in the world, with information on more than 50 million patients. By the time of its acquisition, the company already had more than two-dozen contracts to analyze data for several hospitals to help recognize patterns in diseases and health care use by patients. Its roster of clients, in addition to Cleveland Clinic, included the large chains Trinity Health, Adventist Health, and St. Joseph Health System, among others, according to a 2015 IBM press release announcing the acquisition.

Phytel, based in Dallas, makes software to help providers manage patient care and reduce readmissions that are the source of federal scrutiny and financial penalties.

Truven, acquired for $2.6 billion in early 2016, added health care claims data on the cost and treatment of more than 200 million patients, as well as 8,500 clients, including government agencies, employers, and hospitals.

“With this acquisition, IBM will be one of the world’s leading health data, analytics and insights companies, and the only one that can deliver the unique cognitive capabilities of the Watson platform,” Deborah DiSanzo, general manager for IBM Watson Health, said in a statement following the Truven acquisition.

But the deals presented the difficult task of harmonizing all that data - housed in different formats, and focused on different aspects of patient care - into a model that could be digested by Watson, a challenge that is not unique to IBM.

The federal government has made it a priority to ensure that patient data can be easily combined across different formats, with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar emphasizing this point in a speech before hospitals in May. IBM’s travails serve both as evidence of the ongoing struggle and a warning sign to other companies hoping to leverage big data to disrupt health care.

Robert Burns, a professor of health care management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said the complexity of integrating mis-matched data sets has vexed hospitals and other health care entities for decades. It is folly, he said, for IBM, or any company outside the industry, to suggest the problem can quickly be solved to cure terminal diseases or dramatically improve health care delivery.

_The outsiders not only don’t understand the ecosystem in which they are trying to work and disrupt, but they also don’t understand the generation of information, and how it’s used, and whether they can do something different with it, Burns said. _I’m not as optimistic about big data and analytics in the short term as they are. I think it’s a longer-term play.

He said most technology companies grab for opportunities in health care without understanding how little data is shared, and the difficulty of putting it to practical use. It is a knowledge gap he reinforces to his students by showing them ____The Peaceable Kingdom, a painting by Edward Hicks that depicts an impossible gathering of adversaries - a lamb and lion, settlers and Native Americans - gathered at a watering hole.

____Health care is not the peaceable kingdom, Burns said.

Two former employees said hospitals’ unhappiness with IBM’s results undercut business performance, causing clients to limit their work with the company or end contracts altogether. They cited a lost contract with Northwell Health, a large health system in New York state.

Northwell signed a contract in 2014 to use Explorys to help analyze its clinical data to increase efficiency and cut costs, but the hospital system later ended the relationship after the company was acquired by IBM.

A spokesman for the hospital confirmed that it no longer works with Watson Health, but declined to discuss the matter further. IBM’s Douglass said the contract with Northwell ____ended amicably.

____‘The scope of the client’s priorities/needs changed, she said.',

$30 to read one article? I don't think so.