Innovation's Cutting-edge Collaboration

How businesses can use IT to harness the collective creativity of their employees is a hot topic. Tom Malone, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, recently launched the Center for Collective Intelligence to study the subject. He says, "One of the most interesting possible roles for CIOs going forward is to become organizational innovators." I think Steve Bergman, CIO at Goodwill Industries and a winner of the CIO 100 Award, has a good story to tell about the collaboration process that lies at the front end of innovation - and the role IT plays in supporting that process.

Goodwill is a big, decentralized organization that has a couple hundred affiliates in two dozen countries. Goodwill is known for selling donated clothing and household items, but it also provides job training and placement services. Business leaders around the company concluded that to facilitate growth, the organization needed a better way to share information Bergman says he didn't set out to be an innovator. When he joined the organization, he interviewed many of the key business leaders asking them about their most pressing IT issues and how he could make the greatest impact. "Collaboration and knowledge sharing were at the top of the list," recalls Bergman.

The only tools employees had to locate and communicate with each other were email and the phone directory - which we all know have their limitations. So, Bergman looked for a portal application that could support both knowledge management and online learning. He talked to a bunch of vendors, but didn't find what he was looking for. Buying the integrated portal from an established vendor would have involved extensive customization, since none of the portal vendors at the time could support both KM and online learning. Bergman figured that, after he paid for the licenses, there wouldn't be enough money in his budget to build the necessary functionality.

Then, someone on his staff found an open source portal distributed by Liferay. In collaboration with developers in the OS community, Bergman's team created a new enterprise portal app, into which they integrated a commercial learning management application. They built the portal for less than the Rs 1.21 crore that was budgeted for it. Within the IT organization, two innovations occurred. First, there's the software itself, which Bergman and his team built. Then, there's the use of the open source development process. The internal development team had to get used to throwing requests out to the community when they needed help. But the bigger story is how this application is enabling business innovation within Goodwill. The portal, My Good will, has some 80,000 users company-wide who are tapping into it to develop new business initiatives - more registered users than any other corporate application. A recent example is an emerging computer recycling business that got a boost from a discussion on an internal listserv. "We have thousands of computers donated to us each year, a small percentage of which are so old that they can not be sold in our stores," says Bergman.

Conclusion

Conclusion

Member organizations around the US were recycling them, not only to dispose of them responsibly, but also because it offered a way to provide their clients with jobs and help fulfill Goodwill's long-term goals. A recycling expert at headquarters pulled together a task group of members from around the US to share their insights about the recycling business. "They exchanged white papers about business models and promising practices through our knowledge management center. They posted questions to one another on the message boards, and they blogged about interesting aspects of the emerging industry," Bergman says. The portal has been deployed for about a year. Bergman's next step is to measure the impact that collaboration through the portal has on the business. But he notes that the shift to a collaborative culture is a long-term proposition.