Blog #5 — Program Kickoff
On Monday, we had the kickoff event for CSC Argentina 6 (We are the 6th CSC team to be deployed in the country). It was a powerful experience to truly see the impact IBM can have on communities around the world.
When we arrived, there were flags displayed from each of our home countries alongside the Argentine flag. It was an incredible reminder of the diverse group of IBMers that has assembled in Santa Fe, Argentina to add value in the local community. The event opened with remarks from the Mayor of Santa Fe. It was incredible to me that our project is sufficiently significant he personally attended the kickoff event and shared his thoughts on how IBM could make a difference for the city’s community organizations and his constituents. Due to the mayor’s attendance, there was also press at the event, and our arrival made the local news!
After the mayor spoke, there were brief presentations by representatives from DOT (our CSC implementation partner), IBM Corporate Citizenship, and IBM Argentina. The part that resonated with me the most was not only the number of countries served or the number of employees deployed (both extremely impressive), but that this is the CSC program’s 10th anniversary year. It made me feel incredibly proud to work for an organization that has made such a significant commitment to meaningful community giveback for an entire decade.
The final part of the event included introductions by both the organizations and the IBM team. Despite the language barrier and the delays resulting from translation, we could not have had a warmer welcome. The clients all shared their vision for the future of the city and their high expectations for our help. The Santa Fe Municipality is seeking support in streamlining its data management and hopes that IBM can deliver expertise on how to break down data silos. The University of Technology would like to partner more effectively with the local community, and is looking to IBM for recommendations on how to do so. The Santa Fe Food Bank has ambitious growth goals, and has requested IBM’s support in developing a plan for how to achieve them. My team’s client, the local Association of Business Leaders, has a grand vision for the region’s economic development, as well as a strategy for how to achieve it through the development of an extensive multimodal industrial park, but looks forward to learning from our recommendations on what comes next from execution perspective.
It was a wonderful event with excitement across the board. I am personally looking learning more about the existing community challenges in the coming week, and getting to know our host organizations as we work through the discovery phase of our respective projects.
