I have been corresponding off and on recently with Steve Bergman, the CIO at Goodwill Industries. I was introduced to him a few months ago, after he won a CIO 100 Award. I think Bergman 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. One reason I like it is that anyone could do what Bergman did.

    How businesses can use IT to harness the collective creativity of their employees (or anyone, really), 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 not just technology innovators but organizational innovators. A lot of the most important innovations in the next couple of decades will not be innovations in technology itself but innovations in how people work together.”

    Bergman says he didn’t set out to be an innovator. Not exactly, anyway. Goodwill is a big, decentralized organization. A couple hundred affiliates in two dozen countries generate nearly $3 billion in annual revenue. Most of us know Goodwill because of the stores that sell donated clothing and household items. But they also provide job training and placement services. Goodwill has a long-term goal of helping 20 million people worldwide get jobs that would allow them to become self-sufficient. Business leaders around the company concluded that to facilitate growth, the organization needed a better way to share information

    When Bergman joined the organization, “I went around and interviewed many of the key business leaders asking them what the most pressing IT issues were and how I 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.

    And so Bergman went looking for a portal application that could support both knowledge management and online learning. He talked to a bunch of vendors. Didn’t find what he was looking for.

    The company may be a non-profit, but, as Bergman observes, “the bottom line is the bottom line.”

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (1 vote)

Reply
Digg this
Slashdot
Reddit
LinkedIn