IBM Team Provides Digital Roadmap to Pahang State Government

Corporate Service Corps Team helps local organisations enhance competitiveness in the global marketplace

PETALING JAYA, MALAYSIA – March 28th 2013: A team of IBM (NYSE: IBM) volunteers has presented recommendations that will enable the Universiti Malaysia Pahang (UMP) and the Kuantan Municipal Council (MPK) in Pahang, Malaysia to formulate tangible strategies to improve their efficiency and engagement with citizens.

Following a month long assignment in Malaysia, the team of 12 volunteers from Brazil, USA, Mexico, Poland, Austria, Canada, Colombia, India and China, provided a digital roadmap that will allow both UMP and MPK to take advantage of the changing economic landscape in Petaling Jaya.

Over the last ten years, Pahang has grown to become among the key trade and tourism centres in the country, leading to greater demand from local authorities for more effective communication channels with local and foreign channels.

“IBM was able to help us identify how we can leverage technologies such as social media so that we can meet our key priorities for growth over the next few years,” said  Dato’  Hj. Zulkifli Hj. Yaacob, President, MPK.  “Being a global enterprise with deep understanding of shifting trends in technology, we appreciate the value that this partnership with IBM has brought to us.”

Specifically, the IBM team worked with MPK to assess how it can develop practical, easy-to-implement solutions to engage its constituents and ensure that MPK’s recruitment process reflected the region’s future ambitions to become a more socially engaged tourist hub.

The collaboration enabled the team to maximize the opportunities for knowledge transfer, ensuring ongoing skills development and enhancement for staff, which will ultimately help them continue to grow and succeed in the global marketplace.

The team also worked with UMP to upgrade the existing educational programme at its IT Project Management Academy. The team guided the faculty to establish a refreshed six-month curriculum for IT project management as well as a five-year business plan to commercialise the university's ICT products.

With UMP facing an impending budget cut of 30% by 2020, there is pressing need to step up efforts to extract a profit from an ICT offering that has historically been in the red.

The  team crafted a business plan that by 2020 delivers a return to the ICT Business Center of some MYR6 Million, or 10 percent of the UMP's funding gap.  The team recommended spawning an independent commercial enterprise driven by financial and project discipline, and a focus on generating high customer value through the development of intellectual property.

“Our CSC programme serves to benefit the communities we work with, who gain by obtaining the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in pro bono expert consulting services. Together, we can nurture the next generation of well-rounded leaders with the skills required to lead in a globally-integrated world,” said Noorliza Abu Bakar, Chief Financial Officer, IBM Malaysia.

Since its inception in 2008, the IBM CSC programme has deployed more than 50 IBM volunteers to Malaysia to support a broad range of business, non-government and government organisations, and work on high-impact projects in Penang, Johor, Kota Kinabalu and Kuching.