Collaboration: the old way. Why not?

Just lately I've been wondering a lot about stimulating innovation inside companies. It was sparked off by a visit to the Imaginatik user conference in London. I was treated to a number of case studies in which customers saved themselves tens of millions of dollars by adopting Imaginatik's IdeaCentral approach to collaborative problem solving.

The companies were large - Walmart, Whirlpool and Pfizer, to name a few - who were saving tens of millions of dollars as a result. Imaginatik likes to promote a ten times ROI at every opportunity, which suggests that the cost of the software and services are probably beyond the reach of smaller businesses anyway.

So this got me wondering. Given that a lot of IdeaCentral is similar (on the surface at least) to social software, could cheaper and more generally available tools be used to similar effect? It is web-based. It has places to post your ideas, comment on other people's, add your profile, make contact, get notifications of updates, voting mechanisms, tagging, search and automatic discovery of similar ideas. Behind the scenes, the set-up and management software and a bunch of add-on modules contribute to this powerful software suite.

Could the bulk of this be done easily using social tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter and suchlike? I'm not sure. While I like these tools and am an active participant in the social computing world, I'm not sure that most people would be ready for an unstructured collection of tools. It would be simply too complicated for the average user to start blogging, commenting, tagging, voting and the like. The management tools are the other side of the coin. It would be difficult, but probably not impossible, to put together some kind system to keep track of everything that's going on.

I'm now going to suggest something retrograde which might have my social software pals throwing their hands up in horror. What about using a forum? It's simple to set up, simple to use and you can easily control membership. (I ran a public forum and the spam levels were absolutely ridiculous.) You can also keep the captured knowledge on your own system, usually in a MySQL database which makes for ready integration with other systems.

Users can start new topics, others can comment. They can search. They can be notified of comments. A good clue about value is whether a suggestion has comments. Because it's being implemented in a business context, so there's no personal or business advantage in flaming or being silly. Once an idea has collected a few comments, perhaps the management could move it up the list to give it more prominence. (Or maybe some forum software exists to do this automatically, I don't know.)

For smaller organisations, I would have thought that this would be an simple way to collaborate and it would be a pity if it were to be sidelined by the more shiny toys of recent years.

Of course, I could be talking through my hat. What do you think?

Comments

[Al Tepper]

Why not? Given that cost is prohibitive for small biz and that doubtless many small biz folk already do as you suggest then what you say is a no brainer unless nothing better exists, although I bet something does though he he he

[David Tebbutt]

Well come on Al. Give us a clue.

[Al]

None of the following are perfect but all do a great job for low or no cashola and are a great place to start:

37signals, huddle, pbwiki, Google Docs, SurveyMonkey plus bound to be some good stuff here: http://tinyurl.com/53vpkt

Anyone got any other suggestions?

[Mark Turrell]

The funny thing is that these free or largely free ways of doing things have been around for more time than the specialized tools. I would imagine that if it were easy, someone would have nailed it by now, and shared the solution. Forum type functionality has existed for ages and ages, e-mail to... something must be different.

And there are major differences. I'll start with cost, simply because otherwise I might forget my thoughts on this subject. It is great that there is an obsession with free. Free software over time tends to atrophy, unless the free vendor is funded by a big VC with hopes of getting bought out by Google. There is no money in free, and eventually as customer needs become more sophisticated, removing money from the vendor/s just means no one can afford to innovate beyond a certain (low) threshold. Unless, of course, you have the VC money to wantonly play with.

Another point on cost. Anyone who cares more about saving $10,000 and forgets about making $1 million is a muppet... or perhaps in IT. The logic of trying to save money, and providing a 'check-box' response to a business need is a major reason why so many corporate IT projects fail miserably. This is a real challenge for business people - who ultimately own the business problem - to step up and take responsibility for their needs, rather than delegating them to someone who merely wants to get something done quick, cheap, and look vaguely pretty. After all, you can always blame the users for not following instructions.

Final comment (could be more, but work beckons). Why indeed would high quality companies, who can easily build their own software, undoubtedly have free or low cost alternatives, use a service like Imaginatik to drive $m revenue boosts, or save them $mm in cost savings? Why would they duplicate fab effort already done by their lovely IT departments, advised by a smart IT industry, to achieve the same goals?

Why?

Because the current ways of doing things don't work.
And the solution - the right way of doing things - is not obvious.
And the solution is not obvious is because the solution is almost entirely counter-intuitive...
--- meaning that if you guess the right answer, you will get it wrong
... and there are at least 20 fatal pitfalls
--- meaning that if you guess, and go wrong, you stop your project, and the company waits a year to start again
... and though technology is definitely a large part of the solution...
--- what other ways are there of getting 1,000 people in a 'room' within an hour to solve a problem?
... IT (in the corporate world) has sadly failed in the challenge way too many times to be trusted with delivering these services again
--- cheers for your valiant efforts at Knowledge Management, discussion boards, Microsoft Exchange public folders, those random dotcom software products you bought us and the 10 person firm went bust, those 500 Notes databases, and for forcing us to relearn Office from scratch by changing the interface we were used to for 10 years.

Muppets.

:)

Kind regards,

Mark Turrell
and yes, CEO of Imaginatik

[David Tebbutt]

Dear Mark. Couldn't have put it better myself. The point I'm making is that you have to be a certain size of business to a) make the savings your company can deliver and b) afford your software. I was just holding out a bit of hope for those who really can't afford you.

Thanks for the comment. I think it helps people understand your perspective.

David

(Who enjoyed meeting Mark at the event)

[Doug Murray]

David,
I think you are right to some extent. If your company is only ten people then all you need are ten pads of paper and ten pencils. However once you start climbing away from a manageable size of meeting then you can gain some real advantages with Idea Central. It's not the idea capture that is the smart bit, but the idea sorting and grading that really shines through. There are lots of ways of capturing the ideas, but sorting them out into like minded groups, and grading them, and keeping everyone informed takes a lot of work without Idea Central.

Doug
Imaginatik Investor
Imaginatik Cool Aid Drinker
Not a customer.

[David Tebbutt]

Hi Doug. I was thinking more of the in betweenies - those too big for paper and too small for Imaginatik. And, yes, you're right about the sorting out and communicating. I really don't have a problem with Imaginatik's story.

Let's talk turkey: what's the minimum size deal - in seats and money - that makes sense for Imaginatik.

(By the way, when I responded to Mark's note I was in a tearing hurry and as I was driving to the next meeting, I realised I should have mentioned 'scale'. Because, for the system to have value, a certain threshold of participants needs to be achieved. Is there a metric for this as well?)

Thanks for commenting.

It all helps.

[Rob Gray]

I think it makes natural sense for this type of activity to take place in "next generation" enterprise social software applications, because they are people-oriented and ideas come from people. Innovation should be something that people start to do naturally as a part of their daily work. Our platform is not as specialist as Imaginatik in terms of idea management, but we do have simple idea management capabilities, and it's being used for driving innovation and new ideas.

Where do forums fall down? Mainly because they do not support the information overload that happens when good ideas happen (a great idea has many commenters), the organisational complexity (people from different groups taking part), and with those 2 combined there is no way of easily surfacing the most interesting ideas . If you have only a handful of people then a forum may do the trick, but large groups need better management of activity.

I'd say that the difference that Enterprise social software brings, is that you can surface the most interesting stuff (including perhaps ideas), but you can also see the highest contributors, their expertise, and their history of activity across the business.

Typically we start with as low as 150 people. We're not a specialised idea management tool like Imaginatik, but possibly a lower cost alternative for businesses that cannot afford something specialised. On the other hand we are reassuringly more expensive than the low-cost simple forum stuff. I agree with Mark that free is not sustainable, most business people don't have time to set up free technology & IT people don't care to drive business innovation.

Imaginatik looks like a very good piece of kit... I wouldn't be surprised if one of the larger platform vendors wants to snap them up...

Rob Gray
UK GM: blueKiwi Software

[David Tebbutt]

Thanks, Rob, for your perspective. It's strange that you showed me your system in action the very day after the above post. It looks good. And is sure as heck better than trying to cobble disparate systems together or go the bespoke (hopeless) route.

Seems like we have, at the moment, to acknowledge there may still be an ideas management gap between the ten pads of paper and the 150 person starting point of BlueKiwi.

Should we be worried about that? After all, the ideas stuff needs a certain level of participation. I'm not sure what the ratios are of seats to participants in an idea generation 'event' as Imaginatik calls it. And it probably varies by company type and culture.

Anyone else care to throw in their own insights?

[Rob Gray]

I'd say that if you have a high percentage of activity, you could start with as few as 20 people. In fact, we usually start with a steering group of about 10 people, but it grows quite quickly after that. In our initial "events" (+- 20 people) there will be 100% participation because it's a focused group with a purpose.
Once it gets out to the larger enterprise, we see about 10% participation in general, more for specific groups (an innovation community would have maybe 60% or more).

It's very hard to get to critical mass with fewer than 10 people (I think this is where the 'post-it' note strategy works fine). With 10, they have to be very active, with 20 it's a lot easier. With 150, it gains momentum quite quickly as long as the 20 before them have been active.

We do actually have some customers (think hedge fund types) who are small in number (30-40 people) but with a real need, and enough money for us to be interested...

[David Tebbutt]

Yeah. Good point about the focused group versus general roll-out. Cheers Rob.

[David Terrar]

I definitely agree with David's point that there are some lower cost enterprise 2.0 tools that have most or all of the ingredients required to do idea management for a smaller community and at a lower price point. But first, I want to mention a really good product that used to be called Crispy Ideas, which does a great job of this task. It's what drives Dell's IdeaStorm and Starbuck's MyStarbucksIdea. Those are both great examples of idea management. However, since Crispy got acquired by Salesforce it has become just another module of the Salesforce Suite, and doesn't get as much attention.

Like BlueKiwi, we do ideas management within our standard WordFrame platform. We can post the ideas with the threaded discussions as required. We have the Digg style rating system, and then standard views or modules to highlight highest rated, most discussed and the like, as well as search capablities... so you can do much/some of what is required "out of the box". It can be used for anything from ideas management, to online "IBM Jamming" style strategy sessions (we call that BrainSwarming). When I first saw Crispy I put together a specificaton to build a tailored, specific front end and separate implementation of the WordFrame database focusing on the idea management topic, but we haven't had time to add that in to the product roadmap yet, but I actually think it's an idea with a lot of mileage.

You could definitely do this with open source tools too, although you might do well to work with a consulting outfit to integrate a proper solution rather than DIY. I'm biased towards a commercial, out of the box solution - but I would say that wouldn't I!

This sort of innovation is exactly what we social media solution providers should be encouraging for our customers.

[David Tebbutt]

Hi David. Thanks for the notes.

It seems that different forms of idea management are possible at all sorts of levels. And, both as SaaS and in-house. I wonder if SaaS an issue for anyone. If working on sensitive company information, I would imagine there'd be a degree of anxiety.

I'm with you on 'out of the box' btw. Especially with all the companies above, and I'm sure there are more, coming out of the woodwork.

[David Terrar]

Hi David,
On the SaaS thing with sensitive information we find that it isn't really an issue. Provided you have a proper, secure infrastructure in place, then once the big corporates investigate, they are usually happy. However, we do have a new customer about to sign who are insisting on "on premise" installation inside their firewall, but it's the first one since 2005. To add weight to that on the SaaS topic in general, you know that I also partner the Dutch SaaS accounting product called Twinfield. Their largest customer in the Netherlands is BDO. They use Twinfield's SaaS based accounting to run all of the accounts of all of their customers across all 35 of their offices there.

[David Tebbutt]

Yeah. It's about trust. And knowing that it can all be recovered and made usable in the event of the supplier's demise. A real issue in these troubled times.

[Scott Gavin]

Sure you can do a lot of fun and innovative stuff using free or cheap general purpose tools. I've been there and implemented the low cost initiatives from both sides of the fence (employee and consultant). My stance is that if a company wants to start experimenting with this sort of stuff they can start with a general purpose tool to dip their toes in the social computing waters. As long as someone is managing the effort and it's been set up correctly they should soon see the benefits of working in 2.0 ways and be eager to take it to the next step.

The next step normally involves managers(!), more budget, more eyes and more at stake. It's at this point where companies look to vendors who provide a more structured approach, workflow and metrics. Basically it makes it all a lot more management friendly and enables the initiative to scale.

So yes you can 'do it for free' but when it comes to scaling and company wide adoption, it's a no brainer to look for an off the shelf solution with support and possibly consultancy. It's just the way it is when it comes to management involvement at most companies.

Scott
http://scottgavin.info

[David Tebbutt]

Thanks Gavin. Quite a few suggestions have been made above. Got any favourites? (You don't have to answer if you don't want to.) I've just come from Huddle and it looks quite interesting. I guess an issue for management is always going to be how robust/well funded are the organisations. A tough one because everyone has to start somewhere. Even Oracle was small once.

[Scott Gavin]

I have loads of favorites but it obviously depends on the use case and how open minded the organization are i.e. can it be inside or outside the firewall.

For general purpose collaboration and throwing around ideas, I've found you can't beat a simple blog in the first instance. With something like MovableType or Drupal you can quickly configure something functional with a low entry barrier and is fairly sexy looking. Just down to how an app looks can make all the difference, especially when you are dealing with the younger portion of the workforce who have been brought up on Facebook, Delicious etc....

Scott