Banks are struggling to figure out how to get in the social computing game and where to start. Well we here at Microsoft put our heads together and came up with a couple of initial ideas to help banks get started.
So, there are some obvious privacy issues and concerns as it relates to “social networking” in how you do that in an anonymous fashion and get any real value out in the banking space. Your personal financial position is extremely guarded by you and your bank for numerous reasons…embarrassment on how little you have or keeping the sharks away when you have a lot. So, some social computing features that would allow you to compare your standing against an aggregate of other people in your banking segment could be really interesting.
So we built into our Silverlight 2.0 Banking/Retail Brokerage (http://www.bankingwithxaml.com/woodgrovefinancial/woodgrovebank.html) demonstration some initial approaches. These include visualizations on how you compare to your peers in these areas:
· Bill Pay – how does your monthly gas bill compare? Are you paying too much?
· Retirement – 401k-IRA how do you compare in withholdings with people your age?
· College Savings – 529k how does your investment mix compare with your peers with a child the same age?
If you need assistance in going through the demo or want to install it locally you can get those details here: http://www.bankingwithxaml.com/woodgrovefinancial/
Check it out…
I arrived in Rochester, MN last night for meetings this week with the Mayo Clinic. As I jumped into my cab, I noticed an unusual sight at a small regional airport. Parked to the side of the jet way were two beautiful 747 airplanes. Normally this would not be unusual except for the branding on the airplanes. The 747s were labeled “Saudi Arabian Airlines”.
The question is “Why would someone or a group of people travel 7,000 miles to receive care?” The answer is relatively simple. The level of care and patient experience is worth it. The reason for this blog is to stress the importance of culture and the idea of putting the patient first. Performance and reputation soar when hospitals focus on what is important.
For those of you not familiar with Mayo, let me give you a brief overview. Mayo Clinic is the first and largest integrated, not-for-profit group practice in the world. Doctors from every medical specialty work together to care for patients, joined by common systems and a philosophy of "the needs of the patient come first." More than 3,300 physicians, scientists and researchers and 46,000 allied health staff work at Mayo Clinic, which has sites in Rochester, Minn., Jacksonville, Fla., and Scottsdale/Phoenix, Ariz. Collectively, the three locations treat more than half a million people each year.
The culture at Mayo is unique. Let’s talk about the patient. Patients are assigned a physician when arriving at Mayo. That physician is ultimately responsible for the patient experience at Mayo. The most important part of a patient’s experience is quality treatment that is obtained through collaboration of incredibly talented caregivers. The physician responsible for the patient manages the collaboration occurring between multiple physicians throughout their stay. Patients are not simply transferred to the next department for tests ordered by the previous department. Patients feel as if treatment is being administered by a team led by a coach who is ultimately responsible for the results. I experienced treatment within hospitals frequently the last few months with different members of my family. I can say the experience created at MAYO is far superior than I’ve experienced at the systems where my loved ones received care.
Collaboration works when a team atmosphere is created. At many organizations, physicians are compensated based on incentives for reaching certain milestones. Every physician at Mayo is salaried which creates an atmosphere that focuses on the patient. Placing incentives on numbers encourages certain behavior. This behavior can be good and bad. In Mayo’s case, allowing the physicians to focus only on what is best for the patient encourages the RIGHT behavior.
I found this quote from a patient at Mayo:
"I tell people about Mayo Clinic every day," says Luna. "From the beginning to the end of my treatment, I always felt like a person not just a number. The genuine compassion I received by all of my doctors and the staff was amazing. I always knew that I was receiving the best care possible by professionals who really cared about me and wanted to fight for my life too. It really helps in your will to survive this disease. Mayo made a huge difference along with my family during this journey. During my time there, I felt like I was in heaven."
I felt like I was in heaven! This is incredible feedback from someone who was going through an extraordinarily tough battle.
Mayo’s message:
The patient’s interest is the only interest to be considered.” It is at once both commitment and question. It challenges everyone at Mayo to continuously ask and answer the questions, “What is the patient’s interest? And how do we best serve it?”
I wrote this to emphasize the big picture. When you focus and get your hospitals to focus on the patient, everything else falls into place. Lead with what is right for the patient, period. Then figure out how Microsoft can help our partners achieve that vision. It worked for Mayo. Just ask the 30 Saudis in the lobby of the Mayo Marriott.
Press releases, Company Sites, White papers are great forms of communication but Microblogging stands out when urgency and time sensitivity is of the essence. Many people use Twitter for business-to-business communication, and retailers are also experimenting with consumer-focused communication; aside from the cost of labor involved in posting, the service is free. For example, Whole Foods uses Twitter to inform users about promotions, enabling users to receive updates in real time. Whole Foods not only has the Twitter presence but also has a presence in Facebook and a blog.
Some of the ways to use Microblogging/Twitter for retail:
- Product Recalls
- Share information including Promotions, Press Releases
- Creating a community and having a dialog with customers
- In Store Discounts/Promotions
- Respond to Complaints before they snowball by mining blogs and microblogs
For a Retailer, embracing communities can help build better services and boost customer loyalty. Through online communities, customers can participate in defining new features and services. They can also be the source of real-time feedback to help change the way the business works. Customers are a bigger source of innovative ideas than R&D and can help organizations become more competitive and customer-centric. I love the way that Starbucks and Dell jumped into building online communities to tap into the collective wisdom of their customers.
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 provides a lot of the functionality required for building Online Communities:
- My Sites: My Site serves as a point of contact for other users to find information about you and your skills and interests: its your personal profile page akin to your facebook profile. Users can discover other users with similar interests through their My Site metadata. They can also create and display their networks and groups.
- Communication and Collaboration: Sharepoint provides discussion groups for enabling communication among its members and also allows for enabling team collaboration using workspaces. Built in survey templates enable users to quickly create surveys and collect information from other members. Wikis enable members to collaboratively create content.
- Knowledge capture and sharing: Blogs and wikis provide ways to quickly share information on a site, without requiring advanced tools or expertise. They are often easier for people to update than a formal document or traditional Web site. Blogs can be created on a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site by using simple formatting tools that are available in Web browsers that support ActiveX controls, such as Windows Internet Explorer. You can also use some common authoring tools, such as Microsoft Office Word 2007. The Wiki feature in Sharepoint enables users to collect team knowledge, plan events, or work on projects together. People can easily add new content or edit existing content.
- RSS Feeds: Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way for you to publish and receive news, blogs, and other information from a site easily. Sharepoint supports RSS 2.0 so you can share and receive information about content on a SharePoint site.
Retailers can also create Social Sites where fans of a product or service can get together (these could be fan sites that are highlight specific products/services like in the case of Harley Davidson Ride Planner. Other Examples: IKEA. Another approach that a lot of retailers are taking is to set up a Fan site on Facebook.
Newsgator has some power extensions to Sharepoint for setting up external communities. See details of the Newsgator solution here: http://www.newsgatoronline.com/solutions/external-communities.aspx
Recommended Reading:
- Groundswell
- Wikinomics
Shopping is a social activity and more and more retailers are realizing that they need to embrace social computing (or the “groundswell” as explained in an excellent must-read book by the same name by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff). Offline, people don’t change behaviors quickly, so companies can develop loyal customers. Online, people can switch behaviors as soon as they see something better. People are not just buying online; they are buying from each other. They are comparing prices all over the internet and telling each other where to get the best deals. Shelf space creates far less power when there’s nearly infinite selection online (Chris Anderson in The Long Tail)
The latest issue of Stores magazine has an interesting article on the impact of Facebook on Retail. See the article at CLICK HERE.
Denver-based bSocial Networks has developed Market Lodge, which enables social network users to build personalized online stores within their profiles in less than five minutes, turning social networks into online "bazaars" with members recommending, buying and selling products.
Wishlist, an application from U.K.-based Affiliate Window, allows retailers to add a Facebook link to each of the products offered on their websites. Wishlist is a fun way for friends to recommend things to one another and for individuals to create a list of things they want. The system is built on a 'Social Rewards' basis which means Facebook users can earn pocket money by using and promoting the Wishlist application amongst their friends. Wishlist turns Facebook users into affiliates. The application allows a merchant to break their products in to Facebook.
I was fortunate to meet with two other companies that are heavily into social shopping: WetSeal and Bevy. I had the opportunity to hear Kevin Foreman, CEO of Bevy, speak at the Facebook Developers Garage in Seattle a few weeks ago. I think Bevy is onto something really exciting and enables women to discuss and discover fashion through their networks thus filling a void that search engines cannot fulfill. I love the fact that they cross retailer boundaries and work across their partner base that includes Macys, Nordstrom, Guess and more. This morning, I co-presented with John Kubo, CIO of Wetseal at a WWD webinar. The Wet Seal Fashion Community allows you to create, publish, rate, and buy outfits created by you and your peers.
I feel compelled to write about my latest healthcare experience. Let me start by saying that the industry group at Microsoft including myself has presented the 5 trends in healthcare many times. Kudos to Dr. Crounse for the deck in the first place. One of the five trends is Retailization of Healthcare or the emergence of the non-physician based clinics inside Target, Wal-Mart, and CVS stores. To be honest, I had not experienced one of these clinics up until yesterday. I rarely get sick and will typically try and power through a cold or flu when needed.
The following scenario will hit close to home for those of you who have children. I have 2 young boys. My oldest boy, Zach, attends pre-pre school. Not sure what that really means except we now have schools for kids as young as 2. Imagine that. Zach’s first day of school was last week and with that came his first elevated fever, sore throat, and ear ache since spring. Children need extra love when they don’t feel well so I ultimately had the same symptoms three days later. I couldn’t afford to let whatever it is I had to develop and knock me out for a couple weeks so I called my physician.
My expectations were low when I made the call. I expected to be placed on hold and not get an appointment for a couple days. To be expected, I was on hold for 15 minutes. I was surfing the net while on hold and decided to check out where the closest Minute Clinic was located. To my delight, the Minute Clinic inside CVS is located a mile and half from my home. The website listed all of the services offered and the pricing associated with each. I hung up the phone and decided to give it a try. The local time was 4:10PM.
I arrived at the CVS around 4:15PM. The Minute Clinic is well branded and I immediately followed the signs inside the store. The starting point was a self service kiosk. I entered all of my information and also asked me if I wanted access to information relative to today’s visit via the internet. I supplied my email address and checked off the permission pieces. What a novel idea – give patients access to their medical information! The kiosk said I was first in line and directed me to have a seat around the corner.
Dixie, a certified nurse practitioner, called my name and escorted me into the examination room. She had plenty of questions for me as she took my vitals and recorded them into the computer. I felt that she was genuinely interested in my well being and figuring out what was causing my symptoms. After gathering all of the information she was comfortable with diagnosing and recommending OTC treatment and an antibiotic to treat a bacterial infection. She handed me the script and I was off to the pharmacy.
Two minutes later I had my prescription in hand. My visit and prescription were billed directly to my insurance company at a cost much less than a physician office visit. $59 was the charge. When is the last time you knew what the physician charges were prior to receiving a bill? I wonder how much this could save a company the size of Microsoft? 100,000 employees and their dependants saving $50 per normal office visit? The menu pricing is the same for EVERYBODY. Insurance or no insurance. Pretty simple idea don’t you think?
I asked Dixie about referring patients to different levels of care. She said that Minute Clinic did refer patients that were out of scope for treatment at the store. The percentages were very small which leads me to believe that these clinics offer a great service for a high percentage of folks.
I arrived home at 5:00pm. 50 minutes is all the time it took from the time I decided to go to CVS Minute Clinic to the time I arrived home with diagnosis and prescription in hand. I may have spent that much time on hold just waiting for someone to answer the phone at my physician’s office. When I jumped on my computer, there were 2 emails waiting for me. The first was access to my medical information from that day’s visit with the ability to export it to a PHR. The second was a survey asking me about my experience. Can you say consumer friendly?
We all know that healthcare is behind when it comes to customer satisfaction and automation of information. The power to change healthcare resides with the consumer. By choosing the best overall experience when seeking treatment, consumers will force caregivers to compete or perish without a patient base. The next few years we will see tremendous change in the healthcare industry. I believe the lion’s share of that change will occur as a result of consumer behavior. Be smart and savvy consumers of healthcare everyone! We all stand to benefit.
When is the last time you or a family member stayed in the hospital overnight? Hopefully, the answer is "quite some time ago". Unfortunately, for me, my father is in his late sixties and was recently hospitalized for 7 nights due to cold sweats and bouts of dizziness. When I heard the symptoms, I immediately knew there was something wrong relative to his heart. After a few days of testing, the cardiologist determined he had a condition known as A-Fib. More than 2 million people in the United States have atrial fibrillation, making it a very common heart rhythm disorder. Although it isn't life threatening, A Fib can lead to other rhythm problems, chronic fatigue and congestive heart failure. Chances of having a stroke are five times higher for those with A Fib.
Let's take a step back. My father is your typical late sixties individual who doesn't have any medical knowledge and has not embraced technology. He just started using a cell phone (sparingly) last year. I can just picture a cardiologist trying to explain A-Fib to my father at the bedside. It goes something like this:
Cardiologist: “In A Fib, the heartbeat is irregular and rapid, sometimes beating as often as 300 times a minute in the upper chambers (atria) and 100-150 times a minute in the lower chambers (ventricles).”
Dad: “Uh-huh”
Cardiologist: “During an episode of A Fib or AFL, the heart muscle does not contract normally to force open the heart valves that pass blood from the atrium to the ventricle. The valve opens passively, but some blood may not enter the ventricle as it should. Instead, it pools in parts of the atrium, increasing the risk that clots will form in the stagnant blood. ”
Dad: “Yep”
Cardiologist: “Even small blood clots can cause problems if they leave the heart
and are released into the general circulation. They may clog arteries in the body and disrupt the blood supply to vital organs.”
Dad: “Gotcha”
The cardiologist walks out of the room and my father is glossed over.
Let’s head back to the hospital where my father was a patient. Once the condition was identified, the care team gave my father a list of different programs that he had to watch on the TV. These programs were ordered “on demand” using the telephone. The programs ranged from a simple graphical representation of what A-Fib looks like to educating my father on what to expect and healthier habits when he went home. My father loved explaining to me everything about A-Fib and what he was going to do when he was discharged. He even showed me how the system worked. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the system should be delivered via a computer dashboard. All in all, this hospital provided a better experience through automated delivery of patient education more so than MOST hospitals in this country.
My father was discharged feeling educated about his condition and with little doubt what he needed to do. This is a very comfortable feeling for someone who otherwise would be walking on eggshells not knowing the full story of A-Fib.
Microsoft technologies, including the XBOX and Media Center, are being used in state of the art patient experience and education applications. Arkansas Children’s rolled out an internally developed system to over 250 beds with tremendous feedback while using commercialized components to allow less stress on the budget. Take a look at the video:
Microsoft and Cerner partnered to take the success at Children’s and standardize the offering to hospitals around the country. Spectrum Health has rolled out the solution to a number of rooms and is receiving praise from their patients and local press.
The moral of the story: Picture yourself or a family member staying in the hospital and ask yourself: What would make my stay more enjoyable and improve my chances for better health? The answer can typically lead to a good conversation to have with the hospital’s clinical and IT leaders.
The way we exchange contact information has changed very little since the Chinese started using Visiting cards (or calling cards) in the 13th century and the Europeans in the 17th century. These evolved into the business cards of today.
Enter QR Codes. A QR Code is a matrix code or two-dimensional bar code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response", as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.
The possibilities of using QR Codes are endless: QR Codes could accompany newspaper and magazine ads so that people could scan the code with their mobile phones and get additional information and videos of the product via their phones. The QR Codes could also be displayed on store shelves so that customers could use their mobile phones to find more information about the product. I decided to experiment with QR Codes and to do this I first installed a QR Code Reading Software onto my phone. I downloaded the software from : QuickMark QR Code Reader. This is a free QR Code Reader and worked great on my Cingular 8525 (Windows Mobile)
I then proceeded to generate a QR Code for my Blog via QR Code Generator. Once I did this I got a QR code for my blog:
To test this I fired up the QR Code Reader on my Mobile Phone and took a picture of the generated QR Code (above) and it worked beautifully.
QR Codes can work great for Social Networking. Picture this scenario: You attend a conference where all the attendees have Name Tags with QR Codes displayed on the badge. You can use your phone to scan the QR Code and capture the information that the person wants to share: this could be his or her vCard, LinkedIn or Facebook profile, company url or just about any information. You can also get creative by printing the QR codes on T-Shirts as well.
Snappr.Net is an excellent site that aims to do just that. You can generate the 2D codes at the Snappr site for either a URL, VCard or text that you would like people to scan. Snappr also goes the extra length in supporting phones that cant install the QR Code readers (or you choose not to): in this case you simply send the code to Snappr and it returns back the information. I also love the fact that Snappr has integrated into their site the process of customizing and printing the QR codes on shirts and hats. Philip Stehlik, the CEO and Founder of Snappr, also pointed me to his blog where he discusses the different data formats of 2D codes: See blog
Its time to QR code my business cards :)
ABI Research’s new study “Location-based Mobile Social Networking” offers insight into trends, social networking features, drivers, barriers and includes detailed descriptions of solutions and market players, with special focus on business models. It also provides recommendations to all major players and shipment and revenue forecasts per region and per location-based social networking type.
See press release
I tried out Tagga.com today and think its a neat little application for creating quick SMS campaigns. You can tag items in the physical world and create badges like the one you see alongside and have people text in a key word for more details. For instance, if you text the word SHISH to 82442 you will get details about my blog. Think about that in terms of a product campaign, a banner ad or even subway ads. I could potentially have a badge like this one on a car or house I'm selling and have people text the keyword to get more details of the product/service.
When you sign up at tagga.com, you can
- Create a standard SMS campaign
- Send any web content instantly to your mobile
- Subscribe to news feeds and get the data on your mobile
- Advertise
- Make money by publishing with tagga tools on your website
- Follow other fellow taggers
This is an interesting concept for retailers, manufacturers to quickly create a campaign and reach out to customers. I also see this as a possible way to advertise my product/service at events/conferences. I could potentially have a link to my product or company profile made available to people using a code they text over to 82442.
Shoppers could also potentially use this service for instant in-store discounts by downloading a discount code at specific time.
Link to TAGGA.COM
An interesting report on MediaPost from the latest installment of an ongoing tracking study from Interpublic's Universal McCann unit. Link to Report
Interesting points from the report:
- More than half of adults now rely on at least one of the so-called Web 2.0 platforms for communicating with friends, family, or colleagues on a regular basis.
- Over 85% of adults between the ages of 18 and 34 are using Web 2.0 platforms as a primary method of communication and self-expression.
- The number of adults using instant messaging and blogs has nearly doubled, while text messaging has grown a healthy 8% over the past year.
- RSS feeds, which make reading blogs easier, have become an integral part of the way people communicate and exchange content.
Recruiters have been known to mine all information about you via Blogs, Twitters and the other digital footprints that you leave behind. An online identity is a social identity that you establish in online communities. Although some people prefer to use their real names, most Internet users prefer to identify themselves by means of pseudonyms, which reveal varying amounts of personally identifiable information.
In addition to the various sources of information that recruiters (and investigators) have today to tap into your life, I just chanced upon the controversial CriminalSearches.com via LifeHacker. This can be viewed as an invasion of privacy or it could be viewed as an easy way to do background checks. Recruiters could use Office Business Applications based addins to Infopath Forms to automatically retrieve information from this service during the recruitment process.
Given the malleability of online identities, it is surprising that successful sites (eBay, craigslist) have developed on the Internet that enable two pseudonymous identities to enter into an online transaction.
These sites are faced with the Prisoner's dilemma: the deal can succeed only if the parties are willing to trust each other, but they have no rational basis for doing so.
The solution has been in reputation management systems, such as eBay's feedback system, which record transactions and provide the technical means by which users can rate each others' trustworthiness.
You are one degree away from everyone you know, two degrees away from everyone they know, and so on. The trivia game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is based on the concept of the small world phenomenon and is based on the assumption that any actor can be linked through his or her film roles to actor Kevin Bacon. The game requires a group of players to try to connect any film actor in history to Kevin Bacon as quickly as possible and in as few links as possible.
With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances. The database covered all of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, or roughly half the world's instant-messaging traffic at that time, researchers said. See report on MSNBC.
Why does it matter that people from around the world are closely tied together? Researchers said that the knowledge might have applications for political organizations, charity efforts, natural disaster relief and missing-person searches.
Social Networking tools like Facebook and Enterprise Collaboration & Social Networking tools like Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 enable people to connect with the right people and resources for effective collaboration.
By definition, tacit knowledge is knowledge that people carry in their minds and is, therefore, difficult to access. Tacit knowledge has been found to be a crucial input to the innovation process. An organizations ability to innovate depends on its level of tacit knowledge of how to innovate. Specialized professionals acquire formal knowledge during their education, but to be effective they must acquire tacit knowledge and this is done through some sort of apprenticeship or internship. Collaboration with people is one of the ways to acquire tacit knowledge and collaboration tools can play a very important role. The tools should not only allow you to find relevant people based on their knowledge of specific areas or topics but also be able to connect you with them in a seamless manner. People engage in more effective tacit interactions when organizational structures do not get in the way and when they have the tools to make better decisions and communicate quickly and easily. To encourage more interaction, innovation, and collaboration, organizations need to become more transparent and break down the barriers to effective interactions.
A knowledge management portal based around Microsoft MOSS 2007 suite of products is the easiest way to elevate the importance of people and collaboration over hierarchical structures. People search capabilities in MOSS 2007 allow users to find people not only by department or job title but also by expertise, social distance, and common interests. The blog/wiki capabilities in Sharepoint allow organizations to capture and share some of the tacit knowledge.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps your organization get more done by providing a platform for sharing information and working together in teams, communities and people-driven processes. Office SharePoint Server is an important part of the overall Microsoft collaboration vision and integrates with other collaborative products to offer a comprehensive infrastructure for working with others.
| • | Empower Teams Through Collaborative Workspaces Microsoft delivers a best-of-breed collaborative infrastructure that gives end users the tools to easily create their own workspaces and share assets across teams, departments, and organizations while maintaining IT control. |
| • | Connect Organizations Through Portals Microsoft will help bring the full insight and data of the organization to the right people at the right time by making it easy to connect people with line-of-business data, experts, and business processes across the organization. |
| • | Enable Communities with Social Computing Tools Microsoft gives organizations the tools to deliver a broad set of social computing capabilities within their existing workspace and portal infrastructure, so end users can more easily harness the collective intelligence of the organization. |
| • | Reduce Cost and Complexity for IT by Using an Integrated Infrastructure, Existing Investments, and an Extensible Architectural Platform The Microsoft collaboration infrastructure leverages existing investments, is extensible, and interoperates with other systems, so organizations can maintain a lower cost of ownership and more easily meet business demands by building a single infrastructure. |
Microblogging tools and Social Networking tools also are great way to tap into the "Wisdom of Crowds". The concept of the "Wisdom of Crowds" is a fundamental building block of a lot of the Web 2.0 services. Many sites like Digg and Wikipedia rely on the concept of crowds being wise. The "Wisdom of Crowds" can help make decisions about which movie to watch, books to read, places to holiday in and for the Retail environment, it helps shoppers make decision on which product to buy. Tools like Twitter can also help people pose a question to their network and tap into tacit knowledge.
Interesting White Paper:
Office SharePoint 2007 Document: How to Get the Most Value from Social Computing for Business with Microsoft
Store Associates and Store Managers are usually the people that have the most contact with the customer in a Retail organization. As a result of observations and feedback from customers, they are usually in a position to make innovative suggestions on the business. However, in many retail organizations, the ideas and suggestions can get lost due to a lack of process in place for taking the idea through to reality. The problem is seldom about a shortage of ideas; rather, they lack the ability to determine their value in a systematic, timely, and cost-effective way.
I spent the last week in NY speaking at the WWD Retail Leadership Forum on Innovation Process Management. Among Retailers, innovation traditionally has been a compartmentalized, top-down process run by a small team. In my discussions with retailers at the conference I also found that one of the biggest challenges in the way of Innovation was Legacy. Every company has a legacy. Its the belief that "That which made you great will continue to make you great". The legacy tends to consume a majority of the firms resources. The legacy creates a system that fights off any ideas which are tangential to the legacy. How much time and resource would your management provide you if you had a great idea? As a result of the legacy issues we are seeing more of our customers establish separate processes one for incremental innovation to support the legacy and one for radical innovation.
The rapid spread and high availability of collaborative technologies has changed that model. It is now widely recognized that the next great breakthrough in products, services and processes can come from people anywhere inside or outside an organization. Several organizations including Dell and Starbucks have realized this and created sites and tools to tap into ideas from their customers. The "weapons of mass collaboration" have enabled thousands of individuals to work together and ideate across organizational and geographic boundaries. The Goldcorp Challenge is a great example.
The challenges of innovation are not new. As we look back over the last 90 years of business we see that a mere 2% of companies outperform the market over long periods of time. Innovate or die is a reality.
The tools in itself will not help organizations become innovative. An organizational culture that is focused on innovation and encourages employees to share their ideas will benefit from tools that help streamline the process. The tool should enable:
- Capturing Ideas at any time. An employee should have ready templates or tools (such as Infopath forms or OneNote Templates) to quickly capture an idea.
- Submitting Ideas and Socializing them using tools such as Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server. The tool should also enable people to find information and potential collaborators to work together on refining the idea. Social Networking tools would enable the ideas to be rated and further refined before they make their way into a feasibility process as part of the workflow.
- Take the idea through a workflow process from concept to reality. The Workflow capabilities in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server support this requirement. The tools should easily enable the idea to flow through the process of evaluation and action.
See EPMConnect for more details on this initiative.
Innovation Process Management Whitepaper
