IBM Corporate Service Corps projects in Latin America primarily work with small community organizations and governments to help them professionalize their operations. My team is working with the Municipal Department of Economic Development and Tourism in the City Hall of Uberlandia. We are helping them identify a system to collect, store and analyze tourism-related information - both "supply" and "demand".
Uberlandia is primarily a business destination. It is close to 4 major cities, is near major farming areas, and has great roads - so it serves as a logistics and agribusiness hub. The city and its surrounding areas have potential for agro-, eco-, adventure, sports and other types of tourism, but it is largely untapped. For example, there are over 200 waterfalls in the vicinity of the city (my experience rappelling down one of them will be the subject of a separate post) - but many are inside private ranches and are not documented, signposted or promoted to any extent whatsoever. We hope to help the city select a system that can store information on all of the tourist attractions. They also know little about the profile of the visitors to Uberlandia. The guesstimate we are getting from various people indicates that upwards of 90% of the people coming into the place come for business - but there is no information whatsoever about their origin, the things they did outside of work or the amount of money they spent whilst in the city. We hope to remedy that situation, too !
The project is challenging mainly because of the short 4-week time we have at our disposal. We are off to a great start, thanks in large part to Paulo, Marise, Pedro and Mayla, our clients.
Here's the 4-person IBM team at our office in the Tourism Department
We have 4 college students majoring in International Relations at the Federal University of Uberlandia (UFU) working with us as translators. Two of them come in the morning and two in the afternoon. They quickly proved to be very competent, and we have now started considering them full team members.
Uberlandia is primarily a business destination. It is close to 4 major cities, is near major farming areas, and has great roads - so it serves as a logistics and agribusiness hub. The city and its surrounding areas have potential for agro-, eco-, adventure, sports and other types of tourism, but it is largely untapped. For example, there are over 200 waterfalls in the vicinity of the city (my experience rappelling down one of them will be the subject of a separate post) - but many are inside private ranches and are not documented, signposted or promoted to any extent whatsoever. We hope to help the city select a system that can store information on all of the tourist attractions. They also know little about the profile of the visitors to Uberlandia. The guesstimate we are getting from various people indicates that upwards of 90% of the people coming into the place come for business - but there is no information whatsoever about their origin, the things they did outside of work or the amount of money they spent whilst in the city. We hope to remedy that situation, too !
The project is challenging mainly because of the short 4-week time we have at our disposal. We are off to a great start, thanks in large part to Paulo, Marise, Pedro and Mayla, our clients.
Paulo, the Secretary for Economic Development and Tourism, looking dapper at the inauguration of MOSTRACON, a construction industry exhibition
Pedro, our Project Manager and Marise, the Director of Tourism, flanked by May, Cairo & Christiane
Mayla, our hard-working translator
Here's the 4-person IBM team at our office in the Tourism Department
Left to Right - Radhesh (me - American of Indian origin), Marc (Munich, Germany), May (from Washington DC, born in Shanghai, China) and Jill (from Dublin, Ireland)
We have 4 college students majoring in International Relations at the Federal University of Uberlandia (UFU) working with us as translators. Two of them come in the morning and two in the afternoon. They quickly proved to be very competent, and we have now started considering them full team members.
Cairo (left) and Cristiane (right) - the morning shift
Ciro (left) and Gustavo (right) - the afternoon shift
We are six days into the project, and the team is starting to really gel and move forward. I have high hopes !
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