iRDM: A solution for workforce supply chain management in an outsourcing environment

Workforce is crucial to the success of service industry, especially for those software and consulting firms, where much of their revenue comes from the assignment of highly-skilled professionals. This is even more critical in the outsourcing environment, under which some of the professionals are outsourced from external vendors. Thus it is important to ensure hiring\assigning right people at the right time for the right project with the right cost. iRDM (intelligent Resource Deployment Manager) is an integrated solution developed by IBM Research division to support the full lifecycle management of highly-skilled professionals in the outsourcing environment. Based on the concept of "workforce supply chain", iRDM covers both the demand side and the supply side, and the matching between demand and supply. Besides the framework and software platform of iRDM, the demand and supply matching problem is mainly discussed. This solution has already been successfully deployed in an IBM consulting division.