Abstract

This paper focuses on an imaginative internship programme, named Extreme Blue®, which has been introduced by IBM® to help them identify high potential, future graduate level recruits, by getting teams of internees to work together on practical computing projects, for some of IBM’s key collaborative partners and potential customers1 . The research team were given full access to the Extreme Blue participants, and they used a qualitative research approach, based upon interviews, observations and document reviews, to investigate the nature and effectiveness of the software development approaches that were adopted. The key finding was that the Extreme Blue initiative enabled groups of inexperienced, undergraduate internees, to be melded into effective software development teams, in a very short period of time. Moreover, this exploratory study makes a potentially important contribution to the software development literature by providing important new insights regarding an approach, which can deliver timely and effective software solutions, which are both innovative and have the potential to deliver real business value. The study also makes a potential contribution to the developing literature on graduate recruitment in the IS sphere, by answering the question: how can organisations improve their ability to identify and attract the very best graduate, to be employed in technically-oriented roles?

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