Tech Ed is cooking down in New Orleans. We turned up the heat even further by unveiling Cim v1.1 for SP2010. If you are there, get over to booth 345 and check it out. For the rest of us, I’ll walk you through a few screenshots to highlight some changes in Cim v1.1.
First, it sports a new upgraded, customizable UI as shown below. Over the last month we’ve tweaked the Idea Community Portal UI to play very nicely with SP2010.
We have also upgraded the Idea Community modules in a number of ways. At the core, we improved the architecture to make it easier to support integration with downstream processes (review, approval, management and implementation phases). In the UI we support a number of features highlighted below: Status bar showing updates from downstream processes, new Star Power algorithm used in our Top 10 Rankings, and group document uploads allowing any community members to add documents to an idea in addition to comments.
Our Top 10 Listings shown below now support a Portfolio approach. Just add a new Community, Campaign, Challenge or Contest to the system and it is ready to go in the Top 10 Listings – giving you Most Recent and Highest rated. You can also customize the listings such as adding fields or style, and, you can create your own unique ones.
The Administrative UI’s of the various modules of Cim have been updated to take advantage of the new SP2010 UI such as the Ribbon Bar shown below. Thus, they are consistent with the user experience of all SharePoint 2010 users – and easy to use.
The new user dialogs in the Review and Management sites use pop-up modal forms as shown below to make it easier for users to modify. In addition, it is point and click to modify the forms to not show fields, such as system fields, that aren’t relevant to a particular task.
In addition, in our Idea Portfolio Management site we now provide for customizable actions to drive downstream processes. For instance, imagine a New Product is approved for development. As shown below, this approved innovation is being “pushed” into a Program Management Office to kick off the development project. Other actions can be added for different workstreams such as pushing approved process changes into team sites for different teams to implement the process changes.
These are some of the changes for the new Cim v1.1 on SP2010. However, they are just screenshots. It is far better to get a demo and experience an actual business scenario that means something to your business - where ideas are captured and turned into results using Cim.
Until then,
william
In the last few posts, I’ve written quite a bit about the general Idea Management space, best practices, and how CorasWorks Idea Management for SharePoint is designed to support these requirements. Let me take a moment and point out some product marketing resources.
The main place to go is the Idea Management solution landing page on our web site. Here you find a screenshot based Tour of Idea Management – the basics in 10 screen shots. You’ll also find a detailed features listing. It breaks up the feature set into 6 categories covering the following:
- Idea Community Portal
- Idea Communities
- Idea Portfolio Management
- Customization
- Administration
- General Platform Features
That information should get you going. The next step is to request a demo of the solution. There are links in the landing page area to make the request. It is a great one to see in action – running on SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010.
In case its too much trouble to head over to the landing page, let me drop a screenshot here to wet your appetite. It is a shot of a detail page for an idea in an idea community within the Idea Community Portal.
This shot of idea details highlights a number of key Web 2.0 features:
· The use of CSS-styling for consistent Contribute forms across the community.
· Star rating and the Star Power algorithm.
· Comments, with email links, and recent comments (reverse order bookmarks)
· Group upload of documents - great for work sharing vs. hoarding documents in siloed, hidden team sites
· Status feedback and RSS feed subscriptions (subscribe by community, tag, author or individual articles)
Need more, drop me a line…
william
In my previous post, I went into detail about moving to a proactive, event-driven approach for driving “ideation” and the different types of idea communities including Standing Communities, Challenges, Campaigns, and Contests. In this article, I will drill down into 4 business scenarios and look at the more end-to-end process of planning your activities.
We’ll be covering the four business scenarios as shown in the diagram below.
This 4 step approach gives you a simple tool with which to plan your activity. It is a quick way to frame your approach. The four sections bucket a set of questions to be answered. It works as follows:
- Scenario – What are you trying to achieve? For this bucket you want to specify the objective, the context, and the desired result. This feeds directly into your launch and communication.
- Type – This is where you design the “community” approach and the actual community site. Which of the four types of “communities” fits best? What is the time frame? What is your tagsonomy and information capture? What submission criteria do you have? How will you launch it? What reward or fame will you give to it?
- Process – okay, you have ideas and collaboration. What will you do with the responses? Will you have informal or formal reviews? Who is part of the team? By what criteria will you make a decision to proceed? How will you engage the contributors and the community and provide feedback?
- Downstream – You have an output – an idea that is ready to be made real. What are the downstream processes and activities to make it real? Is there a development project? Do you task it out for immediate implementation? Is there a change management program? How and when will your track and review the progress?
Lets take a brief look at how we might break this down for each of the 4 scenarios above.
New Products Needed – Scenario: we specify that we want a few new products in a given market space for launch next year. We have a $5m development and go to market budget. Type: we’ll do this with a Campaign to last 60 days. We’ll provide 100,000 Amex points to be split amongst the top 5 selected ideas. We require the idea and a written proposal based upon a pre-set template. Review: We have a team of 20 reviewers and there is a board of 5 people to decide. Development: Each will go through your standard product development process that is project driven.
Solutions for an RFP – Scenario: We received an RFP from ACME Widget Co. for proposals to reduce energy consumption for a manufacturing facility. We want our technical solutions and have 45 days to respond. Type: We will have Challenge to last for 20 days. We have a structured tagsonomy and want ideas within 3 categories of technology for the customer. We have time off days for each selected idea. Review: We have a 5 person review team supported by the proposal team. The contributor will be engaged for the proposal write up. Downstream: Our proposal team will make the proposal via our standard proposal project system.
Continuous Process Improvement – Scenario: We want a continuing flow of process improvement ideas for a manufacturing process for a particular division driving towards efficiencies. Type: We will have a Standing Community with Quarterly Rewards for contributions, selections, and implementations. Review: There is a standing team of 5 people that meet monthly to review the submissions and manage the process. Downstream: We use a task based implementation process with team leads for each implementation.
Requirements for Application – Scenario: We want to create a new portal for use by our globally distributed Product Management team. We will be using SharePoint and have a $250,000 budget. We want to begin development in 60 days and want requirements that are vetted by the users with input for feasibility from our technical communities. Type: We have a Challenge to gather requirements and vet them in a visible way. The reward is that the requirements and the solutions that people want get implemented. They are rated and stacked. Review: The rating and feasibility are important. After, the challenge a team agrees on the Requirements and the Solution and publishes the results. Downstream: We go into our standard development process with continued visibility to the Community on the progress.
This framework gives you a good place to get started. As you apply it, and think it through, you will find that one good effort often leads to follow on efforts. For instance, imagine that your continuous process improvement is generating ideas. One such idea is a zinger and could be generally applied across a number of divisions but would require additional political support (buy in), technical solutions and budget. The benefits look big. You may then spin up another Challenge to vet just this one idea.
The permutations are endless. Thus, it is important to use a basic framework such as this to provide some discipline. Each campaign/challenge has a bit of overhead and you don’t want to have too many so that the effect is diminished.
With that said, often, these activities occur at different levels of the organization, some with everyone, and some with smaller groups. By using CIM on SharePoint, you get the means to have a standardized yet tailored experience. In addition, users can participate in different venues. You may have one central Idea Community Portal for standing communities and broad campaigns. However, some of these communities may exist in Department Portals, Extranets, or specific Communities of Interest. Thus, you are usually segmenting your community market and that gives you more freedom to engage more often and in a more targeted manner.
In addition, the Review and Management module of CIM is very flexible. So, you can set up different instances of review and portfolio sites to meet differing types of activities. For instance, you might have one general Idea Portfolio Management site for new products with a lot of structure. You might have another to be used to manage a continuing flow of Challenges such as the Requirements and RFP responses with a “stack and rack” approach to sorting through the ideas. Accordingly, you have the ability to tailor the front end ideation process and the back end review and approval process to meet your objectives.
Of course, this leads us to the integration with the downstream processes – that is for another article…
william
In my overview to CorasWorks Idea Management solution for SharePoint, I touched on our support for custom-tailored, event-driven idea communities, such as Campaigns and Challenges. In this article, I’ll drill down into what these are and how this approach to idea management complemented by the new Web 2.0-style feature sets drive improved effectiveness.
Most people I talk to about Idea Management initially bring a mindset that is based upon the “Suggestion Box”. In this classic approach, you have a passive email inbox, form or community for people to enter ideas. It is passive. If people have an idea and remember how to share it properly – they contribute. Its a start…
However, the studies over the last 10 years have shown that proactive, event-driven approaches to idea generation and capture are much more effective. The event-driven approach involves having specific-purpose, time-constrained “events” for outreach to your community. Here are three examples:
- You want ideas for new features of an existing product. You will have a campaign for 60 days to get ideas. Then, you begin your formal review process by a smaller team.
- You are working on a global application for product management. Instead of meetings, you launch a challenge for 30 days to have all interested parties enter their requirements, and collaborate, vet, horse trade. Then, you take what you have and work up the requirements.
- You have a particular manufacturing process that is broken and needs improvement. You run a two week challenge to get ideas and collaborate on them.
The key change up here is that rather than being passive and general, you are taking specific business problems and objectives to your community – be it employees, vendors, partners, customers, constituents, or the general public. You are leveraging your workforce to meet specific objectives, within a specific timeframe.
Further, now with the new feature set of Web 2.0-style communities, you have the opportunity to really drive participation and collaboration with rewards, visibility, peer feedback and collaboration, process updates, fame, and focus. These features appeal to the fact that we are all human (in addition to being worker bees) – a little competition, fame, reward, and knowing that something is important right now – helps motivate us to participate and do so in a quality way.
To provide some structure and best practices to use the new methodology, it is common in idea management circles to categorize “idea communities” into 4 types as follows:
- Standing Communities: This type is most like the Suggestion Box. You may have Standing Communities for General Ideas, New Products, or Process Improvement. These still serve the purpose of allowing people to more broadly contribute when they think of it. However, you now strengthen the motivation with the human features mentioned above.
- Campaigns: These are generally event-driven sub-sets of standing communities. Such as “Spring is the Time for New Ideas for our Omega 2010 product line”. The campaign runs for 30 days or so, with an objective about the scope and quality of ideas. And, you put 50,000 Amex points or $500 Amazon dollars up for the best ideas during the campaign.
- Challenges: These are even more specific. Here you have very specific calls to action: requirements for this application, solutions for a specific RFP, questions like “How should we change our business in 2011” and “who and why are our top competitors” that will be part of next months planning session. Challenges may have very short duration, even days. Your idea community is really a tool to quickly capture, collaborate and vet the challenge.
- Contests: This is also a specific type of event. It is simply emphasizing the competitive and reward aspects. It is often used with external audiences to encourage participation. Or, it may be an approach to heighten the attention internally. It really is about putting some reward behind the campaign and get many minds to participate in a competitive way.
With CIM, we have designed it to make it easy for you to create individual communities of all four types. Each is a stand-alone SharePoint site where the data is captured and the community is administered. Yet, the participation is done in a common UI, such as our Idea Community Portal. In addition, each community can be custom tailored to its purpose. The most common customization is to change the Tagsonomy for each community. This means modifying the categories and tags to provide structure for each community. You can also change the look and feel. You can add additional fields to capture different information or expose different feedback.
The takeaway is that you will be most effective at driving participation and innovation when you move from passive to targeted event-driven outreaches to your community. The basic Web 2.0 features of CIM allow you to heighten the human factors that make Idea Management “ideation” successful. And, the flexibility of CIM allows you to really tailor these community outreaches to be most effective for each objective, and, to be able to handle them separately.
In truth, this approach and this flexibility, really shift the burden onto management to proactively figure out how they will leverage their workforce and communities. We now have the studies, the tools and the methodologies to influence the results. Idea Management and its impact on an organizations innovation is now much less the result of chance, but, can be greatly influenced through managed planning, process, discipline, and execution.
With that said, make sure to sprinkle in a bit of fun, sizzle and excitement. At the end of the day, it is all about people…
William
On May 13th we released the CorasWorks Idea Management (CIM) solution for SharePoint. This article is an intro to the solution and kicks off a series that I’ll be doing about the solution, idea management, and innovation management in general.
Why Idea Management? Two reasons. First, we believe that effective innovation is a mission critical business process for most organizations today. And, according to the data, most organizations don’t feel that they do a great job of it. Second, it is a natural application for the SharePoint collaborative platform and CorasWorks software – particularly as we move into the SharePoint 2010 epoch, and, as the idea of Idea Management broadens to be more about innovation by leveraging your community of customers, partners, and employees.
 CIM is a very flexible, solution for Idea Management. There are two main parts as depicted by this diagram. There is a portal for the community, with rich social collaborative/community features. Then, there is a back-end part where the more formal reviews take place, where decisions are made, and where you manage the portfolio and the process.
What’s the business scenario? First off, Idea Management is a lot more than a Suggestion Box these days. As you would expect, you can have standing Idea Communities for General Ideas or a bit more specific Communities for New Products and Process Improvement. But, the data shows that the greatest effectiveness comes from “events” that are for a given duration from a week to a few months and with a specific objective. These are called Challenges, Campaigns, and Contests. For instance, you may have a Campaign for people to suggest Sustaining Innovations for a specific product or product line that would run for a 60-day period. Or, you may have a Challenge to your organization, to come up with technical solutions for an RFP that you are working on that runs for just 2 weeks.
With CIM, we support any number of different scenarios all in one solution. Our design leverages SharePoint site oriented architecture to make this a natural and easily managed approach. We do it all with a very rich, Web 2.0-style collaborative UI with all of the bells and whistles you’d expect like tagging, tag clouds, commenting, star rating, RSS feeds, structure tagsonomies, group blogs, news services, work sharing, pinpoint search, and more…
And, while all of that contributing, collaborating, and vetting is going on, behind the scenes you have a robust Management Hub. This is where folks work that do formal reviews, manage the overall process, and the portfolio. It allows for ideas to be seen across the various communities. It lets reviewers select ideas for formal review or just collaborate on them in a semi-private forum. There is a structured process to vote, decide, and manage an approved portfolio of ideas to be implemented. And, of course you have plenty of reports about the Ideation activity and the Portfolio activity.
That is pretty much the bounds of the Idea Management solution. However, being CorasWorks you can extend this solution to really drive results. Unlike most of our competitors in the space, we also support the downstream processes such as project management with our Project Portfolio Management application and supporting processes such as pre-idea collaboration, knowledge bases, external resources, purchase requests, marketing campaign management, travel requests, task management, review tracking etc. All of these applications are natively integrated and wrap the necessary processes around Idea Management so that good ideas can be effectively transformed into innovations that drive results.
In the upcoming posts, I’ll drill down into many of the topics mentioned in this article. I hope you take us up on the offer to see our demonstrations on SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 – you may get some good ideas 
william
With the RTM of SharePoint 2010 on May 12th, we released our first two Business Solutions – Idea Management and IT Project Management. We’ve had a lot of activity since then and questions. In this article, I’ll give you a primer on our Solution product line and answer some of the questions.
Same Value Prop: CorasWorks Solutions offer the same value prop as our Applications – reduce the risk, cost and time to deliver business value on SharePoint. The Solutions are targeted at a specific purpose such as Idea Management, and, generally a specific business group buyer.
Broader Problems, Flexible Implementations: Unlike our Applications they are not available in the App Store and aren’t plug and play – meaning you don’t just download, install and use them. They are a bit bigger animal. Solutions address broader problems. To be effective, they are based upon a modular framework. For instance, the IT Project Management solution has 10 modules. They are productized and designed to snap together. However, you customize the modules as part of a full solution to meet the specific needs of the business group. Thus, each implementation is a different flavor and requires some services. We have created standardized Jump Start service offerings for each solution to get you going quickly.
Enterprise 2.0: These Solutions represent a new Enterprise 2.0 approach from CorasWorks. They have a very web 2.0 look and feel. The standard UI is not heavy components but light UI’s that are customizable with CSS and XSLT. The modules tend to focus on enterprise 2.0 style social collaboration. We’ve done a lot of work figuring out how to properly balance structured apps with social collaboration to create a balanced approach to Enterprise 2.0. This is a key part of our approach on SP2010 as we roll forward. I hope we got it right – you tell me.
Portal-Centric: Each solution is portal-centric. We are targeting solutions where you start with a Department Portal or Application Portal. Look at IT Project Management. It starts with a rich, web 2.0 Portal with a host of social collaborative features. It is a place to go. Then, you have the ability to drop in Snaplets from other CorasWorks and third party applications and sites distributed across your SharePoint environment. This means that you don’t have to go to as many places to do your work – the information and functionality is brought to you in the solution portal.
Integration with Applications/Sites/Portals: The Solutions heavily leverage our Snaplet architecture and existing applications. This means that you can snap off application functionality and distribute it to one or more solution portals. For instance, the IT Project Management solution incorporates all of the CorasWorks Project Portfolio Management application – it is all pre-integrated. There are elements, such as Project Gantt charts and Portfolio Risk/Issue heat maps, that you snap off the PPM sites and drop in the Portal. The key is that with CorasWorks you are able to connect to any information across a SharePoint farm – cross Site Collections and Web Applications. You can also take a Snaplet from one solution portal, such as an Idea Community for Product Ideas, and drop in into a different solution portal, such as the Product Management portal. Yet, being a Snaplet, it is centrally configured. So, you make one change centrally and all distributed Snaplets instantly update.
Pricing and Requirements: Each solution has a standard perpetual license fee for both SharePoint platforms. They require the full CorasWorks Application Platform (Suite and Toolset). There are separate editions for SP2007 and SP2010. And, they support our bridge approach so that you can deploy on SP2007 today and smoothly upgrade to SP2010 when you are ready.
I hope that this gives you a good primer on CorasWorks Solutions. Keep the questions coming and we’ll be back to you,
william
Yup. Yesterday, was a big release for us of our mobile adapter and initial mobile-enabled apps by CorasWorks and partners. Tonight, I’ve blogged about a business-oriented Idea Community and a socially-oriented IT Project management application portal. You may wonder what is going on…
What you are seeing with CorasWorks is the Enterprise 2.0/3.0 convergence. Yes, its taken a few years to get it right on SharePoint. That is because basic collaboration with SharePoint, structured business applications, and cool social collaboration all started in different places across the industry. The analysts still have them all in separate categories – go check out Gartner’s listing.
In fact, a month ago I was at the Gartner Portals, Collaboration and Content conference in Baltimore. I’ve been there for years. This year social collab, mobile, cloud et al was the talk of the analysts. But, when you sat at the tables for lunch with your fellow enterprise customers – they would say straight out that that social stuff would never be in their enterprise.
I then went to a presentation by IBM of their new Websphere Application Portal – filled with widgets and nice social things. And, the room was filled with all of the people that said that they were looking for serious application portals. Yet, the IBM demo looked alot like the demos we do for our solutions on SharePoint.
My take is that we are starting to see the properly balanced convergence between structured business applications and unstructured, socially termed collaboration. Mobile is a great glue for this. The cloud is a solid option for infrastructure. Private clouds are fine also. And, the platform players are all getting it…
It has taken the industry and the customers years to start sorting through this battle between “real” business apps and this “social” consumer thing. I first blogged about this convergence last April of 2009, one year ago, specifically calling on Gartner to look at adjusting their categories over the next year.
Yes, there are pitch battle lines drawn. But, over the years, we’ve started to sort out the proper way to balance the benefits. There is emerging a set of standards, best practices and technologies that are indeed “bringing it all together”. And, this convergence is going to be strongest on top of the super-power platforms.
SharePoint 2010 is simply going to move things forward. You’ll start to see that all of the things that we have been doing over the last year are steps towards this proper convergence. They’ll get greater exposure and adoption along with the adoption of SharePoint 2010. It has been exciting to watch the software industry’s development over the last 3-4 years and the steps of the SharePoint community.
With the economy starting to move forward, productivity at a high in the US and a reluctance to hire, there is pressure to continue productivity enhancing investments. I believe that this convergence can give organizations just the booster in 2010 they need to keep the profits rolling in in the short term and gain a new foothold with higher productivity levels for the longer term.
william
In my previous post, I wrote about an Idea Management Community built with Spirit’s new Community Services Suite v1.2 release. Here we’ll look at second solution which is a Portal for an IT Project Management solution. I’ll follow the same format, some text graphic and video.
Our Project Portfolio Management application is very popular. It is very flexible and allows you to build project based solutions with project, portfolios, and PMO’s distributed across your SharePoint environment. With this Portal component, however, we add a new dimension that brings it all together – the Portal, a project user community, mobile access, Snaplets from the various sites. The Spirit CSS provides the foundation and the community services elements for this complete solution.
Below is a screenshot of the Home Page of the Portal. If you watched the Idea Management Community video you’ll note that it is a different brand and UI – easy with the CSS styling options of Spirit Communities Services Suite.
Next is a screenshot of the Project User Community. You’ll see this in the demo of the Portal. However, here it is shown within our PPM project site. The key is that this community can be distributed to any SharePoint site, and thus, provides the glue for all project users working anywhere in the solution to collaborate. Note how they can create articles and upload documents from anywhere and socialized this information across the community. We’ll point out uses in the video.
Now the demo, click here to see a 5 minute walkthrough of the IT Project Management portal.
With the core functionality of the CorasWorks PPM and the easy to use, web experience of the portal based upon Spirit CSS you have the best of both worlds for a great IT Project Management solution. I believe this solution is a good example of an emerging approach that blends functionally-rich business applications and easy-to-use community services/social collaboration. There is a lot of productivity to be gained by work sharing vs. information siloing. Getting to an effective balance is the key.
Enjoy!
William
This week Spirit released v1.2 of their Community Services Suite. In this article we’ll cover our use of it to build an Idea Management Community that is the front-end to our Innovation Management solution. Below you’ll find some text, the screenshot and a video…
The Idea Community is the web-front end used by a broad base of users, Intranet, Extranet, or Internet facing, to capture Ideas and collaborate. The ideas then get reviewed and processed. In our end-to-end Innovation Management solution they could then be feed into our Project Portfolio Management application to be built out (Products), implemented (Processes) or acted upon (General Ideas) or to address more specific objectives.
In this article and the following video we are focusing on the Idea Community only. For the Community we make use of all 5 modules of the Spirit CSS. We use the Navigation Template for the CSS-styled community, the centrally configured Link Service, the Group Blog module, the News Service, and most importantly the micro-communities. The micro-communities provide a rich community experience for users with features such as tagging, tag clouds, tag categories (taxonomy), star rating and the ability to attach and upload documents.
Below is a screenshot with a close-up of the micro-community used for Product Ideas. The demo has 3 standing idea communities. In addition, it has communities for Idea Challenges. These are used to “challenge” the organization with a request for ideas/solutions/collaboration around specific topics within a specific timeframe. The micro-community design (separate micro-communities as sites with distributable UI’s) of Spirit works very well in this scenario because it allows our customers to have many separate micro-communities as part of their Idea Community and each can be tailored to the specific needs - be it a standing community or a Challenge, a Campaign, or a Contest.
Click here to watch a 5-minute video of a walkthrough of the Idea Community.
As shown in this video, the 5 modules of Spirit CSS v1.2 give us just about everything we need to put together a slick Idea Community. In addition, all modules use CSS-styling and XSLT which makes it quite easy to customize and brand. It is very easy to administer the various elements of the solution using its native SharePoint Administration interface. It runs on the CorasWorks Data Integration Toolset and meets our OpenApp standard allowing you to customize it without compiled code.
Enjoy!
william
Communities are great ways to increase the collaborative effectiveness of SharePoint. Spirit is launching a new version of its micro-community with the release of its Community Services Suite v1.2 in April. Here is a quick preview video of this new module.
Click here to watch the preview video (5 minutes)
The micro-community v1.2 is a module of Spirit CSS. The Spirit Community Services Suite is available in the CorasWorks App Store. It runs on the CorasWorks Data Integration Toolset. You can run it on MOSS 2007 or SharePoint 2010.
Screenshots of a Product Idea micro-community: Home Page and Idea Detail
Home Page of the Product Idea micro-community
Idea detail
Enjoy!
william
|
|
