Beyond the Suggestion Box

Computerworld - There may be more important fresh ideas than fresh coffee -- but there are probably none that groggy IT workers look forward to more eagerly.

Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a San Diego-based systems integrator and No. 77 on this year's Best Places list, depends on several quasi-formal committees to keep innovative ideas percolating. One such committee is dubbed WIG, for Workplace Improvement Group. It's chaired by Eric Williams, whose primary job is managing SAIC's IT-related merger-and-acquisition group. Williams says it was through WIG that managers realized the importance of high-quality java. "It may seem like a little thing, but it's really important for morale," he says. The budget was finessed; the ancient machines were jettisoned for Starbucks-worthy replacements.

Keeping teams productive and creative is a perennial challenge for IT organizations. And the past nose-to-the-grindstone mind-set in an era of cost-cutting has exacerbated the problem. In a time when operational efficiency is king, how do you expose employees to hot technologies? We checked in to see how managers encourage the free flow of suggestions and innovations.

Virtually all Best Places companies feature formal mechanisms to ensure that employees are heard.

To be sure, meetings like town halls, brown-bag lunches and their brethren are a familiar even cliched part of corporate life in companies good and bad. What sets our Best Places apart is that their IT workers truly embrace the meetings and aren't afraid to discuss controversial or unusual ideas with senior managers. At SAIC, CIO Cora Carmody breaks the ice at each monthly town hall by yelling, "What's our No. 1 goal?" to which the entire staff replies, "SOX!" referring to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Crucible of Thinking
Top-down meetings certainly have their place, but many leading employers believe the peer group is the crucible of innovative thinking. Minneapolis-based General Mills Inc., No. 28 on this year's Best Places list, facilitates meetings for technical specialty groups in which volunteers create and present papers to their immediate colleagues.

IT director Mike Meinz offers this example: "There'll be a monthly session where, say, an Oracle [database administrator] presents a paper [to other administrators] on something interesting he's done recently."

General Mills IT staffers also form tech-focused reading groups in which a book on a topic such as Microsoft Corp.'s Visual Studio .Net is read and discussed. Often, Meinz says, these groups result in certification tests for all participants.

American Family Insurance Group,, which landed at No. 30 on this year's list, uses several tools to build innovation into its culture. Concerned that good ideas often get bogged down in coding detail, the Madison, Wis.-based insurer encourages developers to create lightning-quick "UI prototypes" that are really little more than a series of screens picturing the user interface of a not-yet-developed application.