IBM's workforce management initiative(WMI) Essay

IBM's workforce management initiative(WMI) - Essay Example ) is basically an approach to the human capital management which would make the company a global integrated enterprise whose operations cut across wide geographical areas and which placed various value creation processes in a worldwide arena that optimized their productivity and efficiency (Boudreau 2010). The idea of WMI actually was developed by the then IBM’s chief human resource officer, Randy MacDonald in 2003 and was later supported by other members of the work force. This idea required a lot of changes to be done in the management. According to the IBM’s management, one of the important moves towards the achievement of its goal was to start a business metaphor for the IBM which would be a basis for what was referred as ‘decision Science’ for talents. The ‘decision science’ is what actually the IBM envisioned. The idea here was to consider the existing employees, applicants, vendor supply and learning as alternative sources of talents supply which were actually based in different geographical areas and within different individuals (Boudreau 2010). It had also to consider some other factors as the language used in such areas as job description; competencies and knowledge, skills and abilities. This is used in describing the resources and also defining and organizing decisions and views towards the resources. There was also need for an expertise taxonomy which would help classify the jobs by identifying things like job roles(JR) and job role skill sets (JRSS) and also identifying coming upon with common descriptors around the tasks executed by different people. By the year 2003, IBM had hundred thousands of full-time employees, over 90,000 contactors and above 40,000 applicants. These were grouped into roles such that by the year 2008, there were around 331 roles needed to define the company’s work force. Each role here represented hundreds of both applicants and contractors and over 1000 employees. There are several impacts associated with the