Information World Review: Social Applications Can Get Everyone's Brain Working

Plunder the ideas of staff and partners, and you keep everyone happy

5 December 2008 - By David Tebbutt

Imaginatik is a company that helps very large organisations save lots of money by plundering the brains of its employees, partners and consultants. The active participants, by the way, are only too happy to contribute. The brain plundering processes are supported by a rather enjoyable suite of software called Idea Central, which can keep hundreds of thousands of participants in the loop.

Everyone can participate through a portal tailored to their needs, including preferred language. From there they can contribute ideas, see others’ suggestions, comment on them, vote and so on. It’s a powerful idea management system with a social computing surface. The aim is to solve problems collaboratively, using the huge power of large numbers of people with different backgrounds.

The key is to articulate the problem clearly in the first place. To do otherwise drops you into the mayhem of the ‘suggestion scheme’ approach, where contributions are random and essentially unsolicited. Imaginatik asks questions about the problem, and those responsible for triggering and evangelising an ‘event’ (in Imaginatik-speak) can get people to focus their ideas.

The question is important: get it wrong and you’ll get inappropriate answers. It also needs to be challenging, to make people rise to the bait. Common sense? Maybe, but how much effort normally goes into articulating a problem, isolating the most important element and then phrasing the exact question that will maximise the chances of focused and thoughtful responses?

Anyone who responds is shown a list of other similar responses instantly. They can then join forces or, if they feel their own suggestion is fundamentally different, continue with their own response. Anyone interested can read, comment and vote on anything that’s been posted.

As Imaginatik’s Colin Nelson has said: “People don’t collaborate on bad ideas.” People will coalesce around, and contribute to, suggestions they find interesting, not ideas they find ho-hum. Again, it’s common sense, but do we actually think this way?

Perhaps 60% of ideas or suggestions are not original. They already happen in part of the company, but it’s a case of surfacing them and showing their value. When Imaginatik user Wal-Mart asked its staff for ideas, suggestions included switching off video displays at night and removing the light bulbs from drinks dispensers.

These ideas had almost certainly been tried locally but needed the trigger of an ‘energy-saving event’ to be shared more widely. Larger companies clearly benefit more from small changes applied en masse: Wal-Mart has saved $38m. The cost of gathering ideas is dwarfed by the resulting savings.

And the more people who participate, the more likely it is that good ideas will surface as participants bounce ideas off each other. They certainly avoid the group-think that comes from small companies, close-knit teams or communities of practice. Traditional brainstorming sessions and focus groups are similarly hobbled. Brainstorming because of the difficulty and expense of getting a bunch of creative types together in one place at the same time. And focus groups because the participants are likely to be well disposed towards an idea before joining the group.

Most knowledge management practice is backward-looking – grabbing, preserving and retrieving ‘legacy’ information – whereas this just-in-time knowledge can be applied quickly and for immediate benefit. [...]