IBM brings together 11,600 consultants for online crowdsourcing summit
IBM Global Business Services brought together more than 11,600 of its global consultants—it was only expecting a few thousand—from seven countries and three continents (North America, Europe and Asia) over an eight-hour period to generate ideas, turn those ideas into action and deliver new ideas and identify and solve problems that deter day-to-day success for clients. The IBM Innovation and Quality Summit generated "hundreds of actionable ideas for clients" says Cameron Art, the General Manager of Application Management Services for Global Business Services. Art sat down recently to discuss the inaugural Innovation Summit, as well what's on tap for future summits.
Consulting: How did this first Innovation and Quality Summit come about?
Art: When we started out with this idea, we were focused on trying to do a better job of seeing our clients' problem in a different light, and solving those problems in a different way. We really thought going in we would get a couple thousand people to spend some time on quality and innovation, we end up with 11,600 across geographies we didn't even invite. We set the conversation going in a direction and then people start commenting, voting, referring specific problems to other people that they knew were experts in an area or a discipline, and it just goes from there. It's in that collaboration and crowdsourcing where innovation happens, where ideas are built upon ideas and what happens is, through the wisdom of more than 11,000 consultants, answers and solutions start to emerge.
Consulting: And how do you distill that into what you would consider useful insights?
Art: Well, the best ideas and solutions are the ones most commented on. So, you get the natural advantages of a crowd sourcing effort. This ultimate democracy allows incremental innovation to rise to the top really easily. And then on the back end we use an analytics engine that allows us to start pulling out different data, such as where did the consultants spend the most time, what topics, where should we be investing more money, where should we be the most focused on. For example, we had a lot of discussion around backlog and ticket management and from those discussions, we are piloting a backlog and ticket management tool set. The backend dashboard that we get out of this allows us to dig into where the people who are participating are spending their time, talking, solutioning etc.
Consulting: Is that what you're most excited about? The potential of crowdsourcing?
Art: I think crowdsourcing has huge potential over the next several years, but what I'm most excited about is how our team collectively collaborated. I get excited thinking about the power of this. It's really fascinating when you see the engagement this drives. We feel like we can drive massive improvement with this. When IBM is at its greatest, when we are world beaters, we go and take all of the things we believe from a technology perspective that could, should and would work and we prove it. Part of what we were trying to do is to say quality and innovation matters in application management. My belief is that there is today a tremendous amount of inefficiency in the way people maintain and develop applications. This space requires, and will be hugely impacted in a positive way, by more eyes and more bright minds. We have the assets, the tools that will make a difference. This is a space that we invest in, compete in and can show our clients that we use.
Consulting: How do clients react to what you're doing?
Art: Our clients are tremendously interested in it because we were focused on solving their problems, on our time, which they loved.
Consulting: Can you give me an example of a client problem this summit helped to solve?
Art: We noticed that at a global pharmaceutical company there was a common thread among ticket issues of incidents associated with the processing of purchase orders at the company's supplier purchasing sites. In fact, 30 incidents were accounted for on this topic per month which required additional attention and IT support. At the same time, user satisfaction declined, with the delays in the procurement process. By pooling together ideas and insights during IBM's online summit, IBM's GBS consultants came up with a new way of reducing the number of incidents. By taking a closer look at the supplier management site, consultants realized that payment documents were being incorrectly processed to the vendor, and being under-reported until caught later in the system. IBM built a new program to set up automatic alerts to track system errors. Once an error is identified, the broader client support team would be notified to acknowledge and address the issue. The result—when there is a system error, issues can get resolved faster. What once took three to four days now is down to a single day.
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