Everyone – I wanted give an update on the improvements we’ve been working toward this year. In February I first shared a plan to jump-start IdeaStorm into the second year. Kara, Jackie and I have all been hard at work to make these changes. So, I would like to take a moment to discuss the status of our plan.
Technology: Over the past couple months our team and Salesforce.com have been spending a lot of quality time together building the best possible platform for IdeaStorm. This includes two distinct components:
· Continued Site Enhancements: This includes both improvements to the user interface and some of the process improvements below. Recently we launched the status bars to clearly show which ideas we have taken action on. Look for more visual improvements to come over the next several months.
· The not so visible (but every bit as important) Idea Management platform: We just finished our pilot of Salesforce.com’s exciting project for us to improve the management of ideas to make sure they get to every corner of Dell. Our first priority with this functionality is to work on catching up with the 9k ideas. A huge step in the right direction to get responses to the ideas that matter most to the community.
Staffing and Participation: As I mentioned in the last update, we have the same full time staff of Kara, Dawn and Jackie as well as a host of consistent contributors like Matt_D, John_H, Jesse_L, Chris_B, Chris_M, etc… In addition, we are bringing in new experts every day to comment on ideas in their area of expertise.
Process Improvement: Through designing our new Idea Management tool we have structured and refined the process of evaluating ideas. In addition, we are initiating a “house-cleaning” of the previous year’s ideas. This process includes: reducing the overall number of status tag options, merging ideas to eliminate duplicates, and continuing to update the community on the top ideas of all-time and ideas that are tagged as “Under Review.” It has taken time to migrate everything from our existing process to the new one, but it was well worth it.
We are excited by the progress made over the past two months and hope you are enjoying the changes as we tackle these projects. Thanks for hanging in with us!
Dawn