McMaster Congress: Enterprise 2.0 “ID-ah!” at Bell Systems and Technology
40,000 Minds are better than 1: A case analysis of idea management at Bell Canada (Weds 24 Jan, 11:30am-12)
Meaghan McKnight and Rex Lee - BELL SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY
Rex and Meaghan from Bell Canada talked through some pretty exciting Enterprise 2.0 internal projects at Bell Canada. The one that got my attention the most was ID-ah!, a collaboration system their engineers built over the last year based on blogging, wikis and internal voting.
A bit of searching revealed Bell Canada’s Trademark application:
Internet services, namely providing access to a website through which users submit, exchange, review and collaborate on ideas and concepts for innovation and improvement in the fields of technology and telecommunications by means of blogging; providing access to an online electronic database where recently submitted technology and telecommunications ideas and concepts are stored permitting users to vote online to assess the strength of these newly developed ideas or concepts; chat room services; receiving feedback and comments from bloggers, Internet newsgroup discussions; promoting employee incentive award program by recognizing and rewarding employees for their suggested ideas and concepts for innovation Proposed Use in CANADA on services. (page 131)
As I understood it, ID-Ah! is an internal software platform on which anyone in the firm can raise an idea. It publicizes and socializes these ideas across the entire company, opens them up to feedback by allowing anyone else in the firm to build on them, wiki-style, before finally giving all employees the opportunity to vote on those most interesting for submission for formal funding.
They were fairly tight lipped about details, but it was clear that the system has sparked excitement and a degree of healthy early adoption in Bell Canada.
What was perhaps the most interesting thing about the Bell Canada case was that many employees do not wait for formal funding to start applying the ideas they’ve seen suggested elsewhere in the firm: they applied what they read inside their own jurisdiction. An example of this was one person suggested they tried to cut paper consumption: several iterations got to various managers defaulting their printers in the Enterprise to double sided print-outs.
Practically every huge organization has monolith processes, age-old divisions and stalwart cultures. These companies can have the hardest time getting the most out of their new employees. Bell’s ID-ah! system facilitates conversations across their enterprise, providing the means for ideas to be judged by merit, to be iterated by the community at large until workable, and to connect and develop ideas cross-functionally. Sure, not everyone has to participate, but it sounds like Bell Canada have found ways of making contributors feel that they can make an impact. Such systems preserve the spirit of new employees keen to make their mark and energizes the old guard.
Look out for more like this - Bell are early adopters in this case, but many other firms in the telecoms industry and others alike are sure to be keen to replicate such successes.
