I’ve long felt that ideation is a prime use case for IBM Connections and other social collaboration platforms.
Others clearly feel the same way, and whilst standalone tools such as Yambla, BrightIdea and even Elguji’s IdeaJam have been very successful, in my experience it is when ideation is at the centre of a well-designed ESN (Enterprise Social Network) that it becomes not just a one-off task for a particular ideas generation campaign but instead core to the way that an organisation operates day-in and day-out. Of course, the orgnisational culture has to be aligned in that direction too – as you might expect, ideation is not simply a technology play!
That’s why IBM adding Ideation Blogs to Connections a few versions ago was such a good step forward – users could now publish their ideas and gather feedback in the form of comments and votes in favour of the idea.
However, whilst Ideation Blogs cover some of the principal requirements, there are a number of areas in which other platforms have gone further… For example, voting down as well as up (a very important aspect for me personally), analysis and trending of key ideas, grading of comments as well as the ideas themselves and so on.
Therefore I am delighted to see TemboSocial fully integrate their cross-platform ideation technology, Ideas, with IBM Connections.
Supporting Connections 3, 4 and 4.5 (support for the just released version 5 is coming soon), plus WebSphere Portal, TemboSocial Ideas is the ideation platform that Connections has been calling for!
[TemboSocial Ideas is now listed in our Solutions catalog]
The collection process has never been the challenge, heck we’ve had “suggestion boxes” for decades. I can’t recall any articles boasting that that idea wha the best thing they ever heard of.
The real challenge is, after collecting the ideas, being able to suspend the company’s culture and politics which work to gather to make everything a committee process. Nothing truly brilliant nor truly stupid comes out of committee, just the AVERAGE wrong answer.
Stuart, there are so many ways to collect the ideas I don’t know how you’d ever pick the best one. Until the ideas can be evaluated with no opportunity for interference from culture or politics, social networks will never generate truly outstanding enterprise wide results. Lots of hype for sure, results are another thing.
We used a paper submission approach several years ago. Had to deal with over 10,000 peices of paper. What a drag that was for a bunch of senior level consultants. However, with the culture, politics and silos temporarily suspended, this archaic approach, lasting only ten weeks, generated a sustainable $300 million SG&A reduction, a $200 million reduction in approved capital, a $45 million inventory reduction and a couple of corporate Bullies were sent home and a huge improvement in morale.
It’s what you are allowed to do with the data that counts; how it is collected, not so much.
Jim Smith
CEO, Enterprise Management Group
www,engc,com