Jonathan DeGraff is quick to point out that his time in the Tanner Building not only gave him a great education but also left him with a strong desire to serve.
“At BYU Marriott, learning is not an end unto itself but a means of empowerment to do more. There is an expectation that you will take what you learn and use it to make a positive impact on the world,” DeGraff says. “I also remember being taught to prioritize adventures over money, because money will come and go but adventures may only come once.”
Last year DeGraff experienced an adventure that incorporated his career with his desire to serve. He works for IBM, which selected him to participate in a one-month experience-of-a-lifetime in Peru with fourteen other IBM employees from ten countries as part of its Corporate Service Corps.
DeGraff, who served a Spanish-speaking mission in Portland, Oregon, had to complete a rigorous and competitive application process to be considered for the opportunity, and he was elated to be selected. “When I got to work one morning, my manager excitedly said to me, ‘You got in!’" DeGraff recalls. “I had to check my email to believe it for myself.”
Having earned his undergrad degree in management in 2008, DeGraff now works as a senior business partner out of Austin, Texas. Before that, he and his family lived in Mexico City from 2012 to 2013 while he helped lead IBM’s operations for Mexico. He has also spent time in Shanghai, China, helping redesign IBM’s worldwide performance management system.
The members of the Corporate Service Corps were split into three groups with specific missions. DeGraff, who also earned dual master degrees in industrial labor and relations and business from Cornell, worked on a team that focused on improving government-administered medical services for the 1.1 million low-income people in the region by overhauling its patient registry.
“This registry is how hospitals and clinics get reimbursed by the government for the care and prescription medicine they provide,” he explains. “We discovered that only 24 percent of claims were being submitted and successfully processed, which resulted in massive funding gaps and triggered major issues with staffing and treatment.”
DeGraff’s group worked with local leaders, who anticipated a technological solution would fix the problems, but that was only part of the puzzle.
“While technology did factor in, most of our solutions centered on people and processes,” says DeGraff. “As a result of our recommended changes, officials estimated they’ll recover $20 million USD per year in the region and are already fielding interest from other regions throughout the country that want to adopt similar solutions.”
In addition to helping identify solutions to the patient registry problem, DeGraff says that witnessing Peru’s challenges and culture was an eyeopening experience for him. “At one point I went to inspect the area’s largest hospital with my colleagues, and the facility was full of people awaiting medical attention,” he says. “We had to elbow our way through crowds of people who would wait all day just for a chance at being seen.”
The local hospitals also lacked basic amenities. “Even though we were working in Peru’s second-most populous region, only 40 percent of medical facilities there have internet access, and some do not even have telephone connectivity,” DeGraff says. “My colleagues and I visited one primary care facility where, if a medical emergency comes in, one of the physicians must run to a hill several hundred yards away where there is cell phone reception to call for an emergency medical team to come.”
DeGraff’s global experiences, like being part of the Corporate Service Corps, and his consulting skills were recently highlighted when he was named one of Workforce magazine’s 2017 Game Changers—twenty-five high-potential young professionals under forty.
Leaving his wife, Melissa, and his three children for the month-long excursion was challenging, DeGraff says, but his family decided together that the experience would be worth the sacrifice in multiple ways—and the results from the adventure seem to support that.
“More than anything, I feel my team was able to restore hope to the leaders we were working with, who initially expressed a bleak outlook for the region but who afterward appeared reinvigorated by the actionable insights we provided,” DeGraff says.
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Writer: Emily Edmonds
