CSC Corporation

On February 28, 2007, I visited the Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) (http://www.csc.com/) at Falls Church branch. Founded in 1958, CSC has been a pioneer of IT service organization. CSC is a large global organization that has approximately 77,000 employees in 80 countries worldwide. CSC is a large company that has a decentralized structure. Although almost 50 years has passed since CSC was founded, CSC is still one of the innovative companies. The purpose of my visit is to find out their secrets about how they preserve innovative culture such a long time. The following three points are those I thought interesting.
Point 1: CSC has a unique virtual central unit called The Office of Innovation. The role of Office of Innovation is to identify and finance ideas generated by business units (or individuals in those units) and help those ideas to be implemented. They host several awards such as Technical Excellence Awards, etc.

Point 2: CSC preserves its innovative culture. CSC employees know that CSC was founded as a pioneer of IT services. As the name "Computer Science" Corporation indicates (in 1950's, the term "Computer Science" was not much popular) that CSC is always seeking innovative solutions.

Point 3: CSC utilizes various types of ICTs for various purposes. For example, they still utilize Lotus Notes, since Notes are accessible by all employees in CSC. At the same time, they conduct trial and error of new ICTs such as Wikis.

For large organizations, it is difficult to embed innovation. Lessons learned from CSC's practice are 1) keep flexible organizational forms that combine both traditional forms and network forms, 2) establish or keep innovative culture, and 3) utilize ICTs as possible as you can.

[Posted by: Yukika Awazu]