MAGAZINE FOR IBM SLOVENSKO

IBM MagazineIBM signs the Diversity Charter in Slovakia

Hundreds of volunteers helping the local cities

We were the best exhibitor at Profesia Days 2017

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“Women in Business“ seminar hosted by IBM

082017Slovakia is the fifteenth country in the EU in which employ-

ers have access to a Diversity Charter. For the first time in our country, there is an initiative thanks to which companies, non-profit organizations and state authorities can publicly sign up to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. On 30th May 2017, the first Diversity Charter in Slovakia was signed by 16 companies, including IBM - being one of its initiators.

Diversity Charter is a voluntary initiative supported by European Commission and EU Platform of Diversity char-ters. It is a voluntary initiative for promoting diversity man-agement principles and sharing of good practice across member states.

Creation of Diversity Charter in Slovakia was initiated by DIVERSITY PRO in collaboration with member compa-nies of Business Service Centers Forum of the American

Chamber of Commerce. Since 2017, Business Leaders Forum took over the role of the administrator of Diversity Charter Slovak Republic.

On 30th May 2017, these 16 corporations and 2 non-prof-its were the first ones to sign it: AT&T Global Network Services Slovakia, DELL, Heineken Slovensko, Henkel Slovensko, IBM Slovensko, ING Bank, Lenovo (Slovakia), Novartis Slovakia, Philip Morris Slovakia, Pivovary Topvar, PricewaterhouseCoopers Slovensko, Skanska SK, Swiss Re, T-Systems Slovakia, Matador Holding, AmCham Slo-vakia (Business Service Center Forum), Nadácia Pontis and Diversity Pro.

„Diversity is essential to growth and prosperity of any company. It is critical for our ability to innovate and adapt in a fast-changing environment.

For us, it is not just strategic imperative, it is a mentali-ty,” explained Paul Burt, Managing Director IBM ISC, in his speech during the ceremony.

We are happy to announce that we won the best ex-hibitor title for the first time at the largest national job fair, Profesia days 2017, a two-day event 1-2 March with 20 000 visitors and 170 exhibitors! The voting was per-formed by mystery shoppers/testers who were faking interest in working for corporations that had stands at the fair, to see what the approach of the exhibitors would be like. The visual appearance also played a role in the decision making, as well as the communication style or the professional level and ability of giving advice when questions were asked. We brought virtual reality, a visually interesting stand and a smiling expert team of 36 colleagues from all centres on site to provide a great experience to our visitors.

Besides winning the best exhibitor title, we had VIPs visiting our stand - Andrej Kiska, President of Slovakia and Peter Plavcan, Minister of Education, Science, Research and Sport of SK.

This year, over 10 000 volunteers from various companies participated in the biggest volunteering event in central Europe – Naše Mesto. This ini-tiative aims for making the Slovak cit-ies cleaner, more beautiful, and in the same time the activities connect indi-vidual people with public institutions, s c h o o l s as well as non-prof-its. During two days, p e o p l e helped at 233 orga-n i z a t i o n s . IBM was represent-ed by 600 employees who took part in more than 100 differ-ent activities.

Naše Mesto (which means liter-ally “Our City”) has become a reg-ular group event for many compa-nies across the country. This year the event focused on the topic of education and was supported by a so-called “CEO activity”, too: many CEOs gave a helping hand at the school for hearing-impaired children on Drotárska Street in Bratislava. They were cleaning up the area and removing old furniture. The managing director of IBM International Service Centres, Paul Burt, was present as well.

The volunteering work had many faces. From social engagement activ-

ities where employees were spend-ing time with clients of care centres, through indoor tasks like renovation of walls, windows cleaning, creating decorative toys and tools for children in kindergartens or revitalizing a local library, to those held outdoor. Thanks to the beautiful weather hundreds of

people had fun painting walls and gates, fixing wooden fenc-es, cleaning the Little Danube river, building a special pathway to a pond, or cleaning parks and public ar-eas.

People who signed up for Naše Mesto got an offi-cial day off from work on Friday, June 9th. This fact was not the main driver for taking part though. Most people are already familiar with the annual event, join regularly and look forward to it, as it’s a great way of having a fun team-building. Many of our employ-ees helped at organizations which they already knew – as they volun-teer there throughout the year. For others, it was a new experience and a chance to start cooperation. The main purpose of the two days – help and have fun – was for sure achieved in all the cases, and we look forward to the next year’s edition!

30th May was an important milestone for us. The very first BRG (Business Resource Group) summit for IBM globally was held in our Bratislava premises in Westend Gate for 80 eager participants who were representing the business, non-profit and governmental world. BRGs are voluntary groups formed around common areas of interest or specific constituencies such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or issues like cross-generational dif-ferences. This very first conference of its kind focused on the topic of women in business, how companies can benefit from workplace diversity and what helps wom-en to achieve success at work.

Paul Burt, IBM ISC Managing Director

IBM Stand at Profesia Days 2017

with President of Slovakia - Andrej Kiska

Sweet morning for a good causePeople in our company love to bake. This was already prov-

en many times at cake markets organized in the past. It’s not just about baking though. There is a higher meaning behind the idea – a charitable one – that drives us to participate every single time. The thought of helping somebody in need was the driving engine for seventy IBMers during our April cake market session again. IBMers at three Bratislava locations baked to support Ivanko Porubec - a 2 year old boy who was born with acute section and a rare diagnosis - neonatal hemochroma-tosis. This diagnosis resulted in the unfortunate situation that he still can’t sit or walk and needs to undertake regular special rehabilitation. In less than four hours, we collected over 1 350

euro which are going to bring Ivanko’s dream to stand up and walk closer.

We won the “Office of the Year 2016” award!CBRE - the world’s leading commercial property and real estate services ad-

viser, announced the Office of the Year award this year for the fist time in Slo-vakia. It aims to show the most interesting working environment of companies in the Slovak Republic, presenting the philosophy, values and new trends of companies which strive to create inspirational, creative and healthy working en-vironments. We are excited to announce that IBM was recognized and won for its offices of the Digital Sales Centre Europe in Westend Gate, Bratislava!

2 Magazine2017FINANCE & ACCOUNTING FINANCE & ACCOUNTING

FINANCE & ACCOUNTING FINANCE & ACCOUNTING FINANCE & ACCOUNTING

IBM Accounting Class at the

University of Economics

Finance Summer Event 2017

Global Management Challenge -

Slovak final round 2017 Accounting experts met North-eastern University students in

Madrid

Did you know that IBM is the only company in Slovakia that has managed to have their own classes at the University of Economics in Bratislava (EUBA)?

This successful project is part of the IBM Finance Students and Graduates Strategy. And our goal in the next two years to approach 10 000 students and establish an image of the IBM Europe Finance Centers as the first option for potential candidates looking for a job in finance or accounting! The idea of creating a class arose in March 2016 during the first “get to know your partner” meeting between IBM Finance and Accounting centers and 16 professors from various university faculties. Within a very short period, two classes were created, and since September last year, students have had the unique opportunity to sign up for them. The “father” and a further developer of the IBM Accounting class is Robert Lehocky who is at IBM since 2002, and is a senior manager in the Regional Accounting Center Bratislava.

The tradition in our Finance center is that each year there is a summer event organized for employees where colleagues meet with family members for a day of sport, fun and socializing. This year was no exception. During the whole event, people had a chance to enjoy many activities and attractions. You had an opportunity to measure your strengths and capabilities in football, basketball, Strongman and Strongwoman tournaments. Let us congratulate the lucky win-ners!

On May 19th, IBM Finance sponsored by Robert Parker, IBM Europe CFO, had the pleasure to host the top 25 students from the Northeastern University at the Account-ing Bachelor Program. The group was on a study abroad program in Spain to gain a per-spective on accounting and audit in global companies. IBM offered a rich agenda with experts on these topics and hands on expe-rience on Watson Analytics. The discussion in the morning was oriented towards audit in an international company with Andres Jalfen, Director of Audit and Investigations EMEA and Jon Correnti, Finance Strategy Leader for Transformation & Operations, who talked about IBM’s strategic planning process. In this part students also had an interactive session regarding cognition and Watson Analytics.

After the lunch break, our Slovak colleagues Robert Lehocky, Services Accounting Senior Manager and Tomas Klement, Services Con-tract Review EMEA Manager, started the ac-counting overview presentation. Robert guid-ed students through the accounting process in a global corporation, mentioned accounting

centers, systems, closing process, answered questions regarding reconciliation of financial state-ments and also explained the difference between US GAAP and statutory books. Tomas gave students a flavor of the contract review process and cooperation with an external auditor. Further on, part of the agenda in Madrid was also a Roundtable with Robert and Tomas with over 25 mem-bers of the Europe and SPGI Finance Team, discussing the topic of closing period shortening, the Regional Accounting Center strategic initiatives or key projects such as new revenue recognition adoption. Tomas Klement also facilitated education on accounting topics for the Finance team in Madrid.

The sponsoring professor shared his feedback on this event, “This was by far the highlight of the Northeastern Accounting Bachelor program” and we would like to thank to Robert and Tomas for a great representation of our Accounting center in the world.

On March 9th, we hosted the Global Management Challenge’s (GMC) Slovak national final in its Tower 115 location. This challenge is the world’s largest stu-dents’ management simulation competition, and it is one of the initiatives sup-porting external branding of IBM Finance and Accounting. In total, this year, IBM Europe Finance Centers mentored eight student teams and two internal-em-ployee teams. Participants came to compete for the first prize - tickets to the GMC World’s Final in Quatar. In addition, we offer a contract of employment to the winning team as well as an opportunity of job shadowing and coaching from the IBM Finance leaders to the teams in 2nd and 3rd place. IBM ISC was repre-sented by three IBM-mentored teams. The best one was the “Itanjimon” team that ranked in 4th place.

A week after the national final, the GMC Gala took place in the J&T Banka Cafe where the winning team was announced. Thanks to IBM participation in the competition, we got a step closer to the students at the universities. We also received positive feedback from participants, and IBM was highlighted by the main organizer and academic partners for the support of the national final and the teams.

Winner of the football tournament: Global Markets team, best football player: Robert DianiskaThe best basketball player: Dominika LepeseovaStrongman winner: Ivan PozelStrongwoman winner: Laura Slobodova

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We welcomed 40 enthusiastic students from high school in Banská Bystrica (Stredná priemyselná škola Jozefa Murgaša, study field electrical engineering and IT). The idea came from our colleague Adam who suggested that his brother’s class has a project to visit a company, find out more about its “daily life” and this way he would love to share with them what it means to work for IBM. So we went for it! The personal engagement on both sides played a critical role - students arranged a bus from Banská Bystrica, secured guidance of a necessary amount of teachers and we made sure that the 4-hour agenda would keep the students engaged, entertained and fed with new information and interesting facts about our com-pany and its technologies. The day started with splitting students into 2 smaller groups and before jumping into collaborative exercise, we collected their expectations. These included having fun, learning about new technologies, seeing what applications are being devel-oped in IBM, experiencing the IBM office life, trying some coding and finding out if there are any girls working in IT ;) Thanks to Lenka Krivosudska and Marek Holek who acted as Agile coaches, every-body experienced the team project work driven in waterfall com-pared to the iterative agile methodology and in the effort to improve, students became very passionate and proud of their deliverables. After the lunch break, which was also used for a virtual reality test-ing experience, Martin Krajco shared his personal engagements in Bluemix platform, its functionalities and the students could see and try coding live directly at the session. In parallel, another class was listening to presenters Zuzana Sindler and Martin Meciar who shared their career paths in IBM, the mission of projects they deliver with their squads, the technologies they use and applications they manage and develop with the main focus on introducing Cognitive technologies. Adam Barniak, our intern working as Java developer

on AccessHUB project, shared his experience with initial technical interview, the challeng-es he was dealing with in a daily project life and opportunities for learning and sharing. Calling this “Iteration 0” of High school visits we all confirmed this was time well spent, we had a chance to meet, speak, inspire and advice young talents who are still free and able to decide what their future study field would be and where they see their future job... and we truly believe their future job opportunities are in IT and for many, with us!

Students from a technical high school visit IBM

Magazine2017

IT IT IT

IT IT

Roller coaster ride in our office

Pilot Escape Room for internship program in Bratislava

Do you know the NGO “Aj ty v IT”? It is an organization whose main focus is to promote IT studies and career among girls and women. Several passionate IBMers put together their heads with representatives of this orga-nization, and we came up with the idea of organizing a gaming event in our premises. And that is what happened a few days ago in the still fairly new & completely agile IBM CIO office in Apollo, Bratislava.

Accompanied by some sweet & savory snacks, lem-onade & coffee, we welcomed around 20 non-IBM girls from various backgrounds. Our colleague Janka Lancíková, who used to be a gamer in the past, shared her personal gaming history. And then the real fun started – 4 zones were waiting for our guests: a PS4 playground, a virtual reality & PC games room, board games & a chill out zone. Comfortably seated in Tuli bags, the girls tested their NHL skills or enjoyed a roller coaster ride with the VR Oculus device – the experience was quite incredible! We mingled among all the participants and got to know some very interesting ladies who liked the event & our space very much.

This evening was full of fun and the most difficult part was to end it, as it was such a great time for all. We defi-nitely got some girls excited about IT and IBM! Thanks to all the wonderful colleagues who put their great energy into this project and hopefully looking to repeat it in the future!

Starting the second quarter of 2017, CIO & GBS CIC with cooperation of HR welcomed 36 students from FEI and other technical faculties in our pilot escape room held in IBM Apollo office. The escape room was prepared to assess programming, analytical and cooperation skills of university students and select the best talents for face to face meetings with our CIO managers. Both days, CIO was run-ning 2 simultaneous rooms with 4 players in each room. Players had to use provided leads to connect to the server via provided laptop, call the database and change the setting of the web page where “mad scientist” started time countdown.

As always, the challenge was to stop the “mad scientist” from destroying the Earth in approximate-ly 90 minutes using logical thinking, HTML, SQL, PHP and Java. Each room had observers from HR, GBS and CIO. Successful students interested in working with IBM/CIO will be invited to F2F meetings with managers in the coming weeks.

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IBM Magazine 2017 was prepared especially for IBM employees. The magazine will be published quarterly. Don’t hesitate to contact our redaction on olga.budynska@sk.ibm.com or MKecsoov@sk.ibm.com

Magazine2017

Magazine2017

William Carbone Speaking in INAT Summit in Belgrade

ThinkDesk @T115

Driving efficiency with

Design Thinking

IBM Design Thinking

workshop

SMS Team Shows Cognitive Text Ana-

lytics to Students at the Comenius

University

A multi-culti event at the Comenius University

Everyone who has ever learned a new language definitely remem-bers the excitement when having the opportunity to talk to a native speaker and get to know the par-ticular country better by a per-son originally coming from there. As one of our basic distinguish features in the STS (Sales Trans-action Support) centre is diversity of cultures and a wide range of languages we speak here, we de-cided to provide this op-portunity to students who can appreciate it the most - those studying languages at the Filozoficka Faculty of the Comenius Univer-sity. The very first pure STS external event brought our natural working environment to premises of the fac-

ulty in April 2017. IBMers coming from Finland,

France, Germany, Italy and Spain joined to share their experience with students by introducing their homelands and habits. They also gave away a „real taste of their countries” – in a form of sam-ples of traditional foods like typi-cal Spanish tortilla, Finland berry pie, Italian home-made pizza or French cheese!

In April this year, 500 entrepreneurs, investors, industry and NGO leaders, professors and young professionals came to INAT (Innovation Attitude) Summit in Belgrade, Serbia to listen to speakers from over 10 countries. Our colleague William Carbone from the Cognitive Process Services team in Bratislava was invited as one of the speakers - as the only one representing IBM!

William is a true expert in the field of cognitive computing and as such, he had an opportunity to show his skills, knowledge, deep interest and opinion outside of CPS Bratislava and even outside of IBM. He was one of the speakers in the panel “Wearing Your Data and Wearing Your Heart in Busi-ness” and led the workshop “Cognitive computing and the “H” factor: How Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are transforming data into wisdom.”

We bring you a new level of IT support which focuses on user experience and saves some time for IBMers in Bratislava. At ThinkDesk we will not ask you for the ticket, you just walk up, sign in via kiosk to get on-site support. ThinkDesk supports all IBM devices, platforms and operating systems such as MacOS, Windows and Linux, Android and iOS. Feel free to visit ThinkDesk every working day in Tower 115 on the 6th floor. Opening hours are currently from 9am to 5pm.

As our organization adopts new ways of working, the Continuous Innovation Team is reinventing itself by embracing new approaches when driving productiv-ity. At the beginning of the year we ran the first Design Thinking Workshop in Bratislava STS Center with the involvement of CPS Bratislava and APC Budapest teams, exposing them to a new way of driving effi-ciency through self-driven innovation.

When CPS reached out to the Continuous Inno-vation Team looking for a solution to their process complexity and lack of engagement between differ-ent locations, it looked like the perfect opportunity to try something new. We needed a disruptive ap-proach that would allow us to achieve client satisfac-tion and engagement in an unconventional way. We found all that and more in Design Thinking, a meth-odology that focuses on empathizing with our clients and empowers the teams to work autonomously in a transparent and creative environment, identifying and implementing solutions that perfectly fit their needs. The session lasted 2 days and counted with the pres-ence of more than 20 people from BPSO Bratislava and APC Budapest teams. Based on the solutions and out-comes, a first iteration was created and all the team members were assigned with tasks and deadlines.

What’s next? After each design thinking session we organize weekly follow-up sessions with the own-ers of the assigned tasks in order to ensure success-ful completion and documentation of teams’ simpli-fications.

During the regular discussions in our Apollo Iteration Managers Chapter platform, we iden-tified a need to have a common framework for building up ideas and transforming them to successful designs. One of the best prac-tices that has been developed and is used in our company is IBM Design Thinking. A two day educational workshop in Apollo was led by an experienced Agile & Design Thinking coach. We gathered 25 participants from all over Bratislava CIO organization. The course started with minimal theoretical introduction which was followed by a number of exercises for various Design Thinking techniques, such as: Personas, Empathy mapping, Scenario mapping, Ideation, Prioritization grid, Story-boarding, Roadmaps and Hills. All of them are very user centric and focused on provid-ing a real value to our client.

In cooperation with the Faculty of Natural Sci-ences (Comenius University in Bratislava), our Cli-ent Experience CoE team had the very first oppor-tunity to be present in the world of academia. On April 5th, members of our team participated in the IBM Smarter Universities Initiative in Slovakia.

Besides numeric scores (quantitative data) which reflect the client feedback in our client experience survey responses, we are often challenged to work with verbatim comments. In other words, we need to be able to extract insights and identify patterns of pain points, based on clients’ own thoughts, ex-pressed in words. And naturally, with growing vol-umes of such unstructured (text) data, more and more time would be needed to complete this task by manual reading.

Gabriela Tothova and Juraj Rychtarik discussed methods used to investigate data collected through surveys and shifting trends in text analytics. They discussed how we used Watson Explorer (WEX) to help extract insights and trends in unstructured (text) data, and provided a practical demonstration of the current capabilities of WEX. Our next stop is planned for the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Philosophy!

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