Fri. Sep. 19, 2008
For those who missed it, I broke my 2 week (or fortnightly) update cycle last week with a post to mark our 10,000th idea. In that post, I commented on the fact we have implemented or partially implemented 2% of the ideas. And this week, winoffice posted the idea that Dell, you need to implement more than 2% of ideas. We also had an idea from dika to Review all Ideas. Last month, winoffice also posted the increasingly popular idea: When you choose not to implement an idea, explain why. And I know there are even more similar ideas out there…
I’d like to take this opportunity to share some insights on how the ideas from IdeaStorm are reviewed across the company. First of all, we have a central Community and Conversations team with a very diverse background of experience and knowledge. This team works across the blogs, forums and IdeaStorm. Jackie_c is the full time IdeaStorm moderator, but you will see other members of this team on IdeaStorm engaging in the conversations, comments and updates.
While every Dell employee obviously has access to IdeaStorm, we have varying degrees of engagement on the site across the different departments – Product Group, Online, Retail, Marketing, Linux, etc. Therefore, we use both an information pull and an information push system. Some teams are regularly reviewing ideas that pertain to their business unit via formal and informal processes. The central team, us, also push the information and ideas that pertain to specific areas of the business. We manage these ideas on the backend of the site to provide appropriate ideas to the appropriate business unit.
To answer the some of the most recent pressing questions:
· “Is every idea reviewed?” The answer is yes. Is it reviewed at the right time, by the right person? Well, we’re working on that and getting better all the time.
· “Will every idea get a status tag?” The answer to this remains no. It is not efficient for us to do this.
· “Will we begin implementing more than 2% of the ideas?” I believe so. The company focus on innovation and direct customer feedback, in conjunction with the idea management processes we have and are continuously improving, will make this happen.
· “Will we tell you why we chose to do or not do something?” Not all the time. We aim to be as transparent as possible, when and where it makes sense. But, do remember it would not be wise competitively to share all of our corporate strategy online.
In my last update, I also referenced a site upgrade coming at the end of October. These changes will affect both your user experience as well as the idea management process. I personally have high confidence that these enhancements will help us continue to increase our Dell employee engagement on IdeaStorm, and therefore, improve on our ability to meet your request for more information from us and how we use your ideas. Keep ‘em coming!