IBM’s Customer Experience Lab

IBM recently announced the IBM Customer Experience Lab. The Lab, a collaboration between IBM Research and Global Business Services (GBS), will focus on three major areas: Customer Insight, Customer Engagement and Employee Engagement. The focus and mission of the Lab is to address the challenges and opportunities arising from the convergence of social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and digital technologies, focusing uniquely on front office challenges.

GBS is the professional services arm of IBM Global Services. (Global Technology Services makes up the rest of Global Services.) GBS includes management consulting, systems integration, and application management services, and incorporates the assets IBM obtained when it acquired PwC. In this context, GBS provides the “arms and legs” to manage services engagements and brings the diverse array of existing IBM technologies to bear on a solution. By contrast, Research brings a completely different set of capabilities, determining whether an engagement is feasible and, if so, leverages its assets to commercialize its research efforts.