Case Study 01. IBM ThinkPlace, Global Innovation Platform
Industry: Enterprise Technology. Timeline: 2002 to 2006.
The Problem.
Large organizations generate ideas constantly, but they have no reliable way to connect those ideas to the people, budget, and resources that could make them real. Good ideas die in hallways and email threads. A company the size of IBM, with hundreds of thousands of employees spread across the globe, needed a way to capture innovation wherever it started and route it to the people who could act on it.
The Solution.
I was the lead developer on IBM ThinkPlace, working in the Business Technology and CIO office. Alongside an IT architect, I co-designed the system architecture and built significant portions of the application myself. ThinkPlace was a global, multi-language, web-based platform for submitting ideas, collaborating on them, and associating them with the right people and resources across IBM’s worldwide organization. It captured submissions from anywhere in the company, organized them so that related ideas and the people behind them could find each other, and connected the promising ones to the decision-makers and resource pools that could fund and build them.
The Outcome.
ThinkPlace was adopted across IBM’s global organization and generated cost savings and revenue measured in the millions. More than the numbers, it set the pattern that has defined the thirty years of work since: understand the real problem first, then build a system that connects the right information to the right people at the right time.
It also opened the next door. Proving that a global collaboration system could work at IBM’s scale led directly into what became the most rewarding work of my time there: a company-wide effort to find out whether three-dimensional virtual worlds could become the next place work actually happened.