IBM如何绕开内部官僚主义作风

    去年晚些时候，莱恩·赫顿想到一个他自认为极好的创意。这位IBM项目经理认为，开发一个基于云的网页应用，帮助IBM员工实时了解其应用在公司内部的使用情况一定是个绝妙的主意。

    赫顿说：“我们希望人们能够衡量自己开发的应用所带来的影响，包括跟踪应用的使用者和它们的使用频率等。”

    如果是在今年之前，赫顿还要像其他许多大公司里那些渴望成为创新者的人一样，先要把把自己的提案提交给评审委员会，评审委员花几个月的时间决定是支持还是反对。如果项目获得批准，还要再用几个月时间来筹集资金，招募人手。而现在，通过一个最新推出的内部大众筹资平台iFundIT，赫顿可以绕过这些官僚主义制度，把自己的应用（名为Tap-O-Meter）直接展示给它的目标用户——全球的IBM员工。

    这个平台的创始人、IBM CIO Lab团队负责人弗朗索瓦·雷古斯说：“我们模仿了Kickstarter和Indiegogo等公众筹资平台。我们首先想到的问题是，如何保证一切有好创意的人能够有机会让别人看到、听到自己的创意？我们如何充分利用公司同仁的一切知识和创造力？”

    与Kickstarter一样，IBM员工可以提交创意、评论同事的创意，也可以提出改进意见，甚至进行投资。而提交者可以设定一个融资目标，收回基础编码、架构和测试的成本。如果有IBM员工对项目感兴趣，愿意利用自己的专业知识协助开发项目，提交者可以将他们吸收进项目团队。员工可以投票支持自己喜欢的提案，每一票代表100美元（每位员工最高可支配2,000美元）。而这些资金均来自CIO Lab提供的300,000美元的内部投资基金。

    雷古斯说：“只要支持的总金额达到25,000美元，我们就可以出资推动项目继续发展。”自去年一月份iFundIT启动以来，共有30个国家的1,000多名IBM员工参与了这个平台的活动。到目前为止发布的160项提案中，共有20项达到了融资目标，而它们的融资金额从10,000美元到30,000美元不等。

    雷古斯表示，所有项目的初衷都是“完善我们内部的工作方式。他们解决各种问题，从提高供应链的效率，到改进销售工具，以及各种不同用途的内部应用，涉及的范围很广。”

    众多iFundIT项目所提高的生产效率能够转化成多少真金白银？现在讨论这个问题还为时尚早。她补充道：“到目前为止，iFundIT最大的影响是在文化方面。大家喜欢这个平台， 因为它会让他们的工作更加有趣，让他们有机会针对困扰他们的业务问题找出解决方案。”

    莱恩·赫顿印象最深刻的是iFundIT的速度。他的Tap-O-Meter仅用一个月就获得了批准，赢得六大洲40多名同事的支持。目前，他正在与五位志愿者组成的团队一起构建这个应用的架构。

    三年前，24岁的赫顿大学毕业后就加入了IBM。他说：“我很高兴这么快就能看到结果。我的职业生涯刚刚起步便能产生这样的影响，真是不可思议。当初谁能想到在这样一家大型跨国公司竟然会发生这样的事。真是太棒了。”（财富中文网）

    译者：刘进龙/汪皓   

    Late last year, Ryan Hutton had what he thought was a bright idea. The IBM project manager thought it would be great to build a cloud-based web application that would give any IBM (IBM) employee access to real-time data about how his or her apps were being used within the company.

    "I wanted people to be able to measure the impact of the apps they had developed, including the ability to track who's using them and how often," Hutton says.

    Until this year, Hutton would have followed the same path that would-be innovators take at many other big companies, submitting his proposal to a review board that would take months to give it a thumbs up or down and, if the project got approved, months more to fund and staff it. Instead, Hutton was able to bypass the bureaucracy and pitch his app, dubbed Tap-O-Meter, directly to its intended users -- IBM's employees around the world -- via a new in-house crowdfunding platform called iFundIT.

    "We modeled it on public crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo," says Francoise LeGoues, head of IBM's CIO Lab, who created the program. "The question we started with was, how do we make sure everyone with a great idea gets a chance to have it seen and heard? How do we make use of all the knowledge and creativity in the company?"

    As with Kickstarter, IBM employees can get involved by submitting an idea, by critiquing it and suggesting improvements, or by investing in it. Submitters set a funding target to cover the cost of basic coding, architecture, and testing. They can also enlist teams of IBMers who volunteer their expertise to help develop projects that interest them. Employee backers support proposals they like by voting in $100 chunks (up to a maximum of $2,000 per employee) that come out of a $300,000 fund supplied by the CIO Lab.

    "Once the total amount of support reaches $25,000, we fund the project and move forward with it," says LeGoues. Since iFundIT launched last January, more than 1,000 IBM employees in 30 countries have participated in one way or another. Of the 160 proposals posted so far, 20 have reached their funding targets, which range from $10,000 to $30,000.

    All of the projects are intended "to improve the way we do things internally," says LeGoues. "They address a variety of issues, from making the supply chain more efficient, to better sales tools, to internal apps for different uses."

    It's too soon to put a dollar figure on productivity gains from iFundIT projects, she adds: "The biggest impact so far has been cultural. People love it, because it makes their jobs more fun and gives them a chance to invent solutions for business problems that have been frustrating them."

    What has impressed Ryan Hutton most is iFundIT's speed. His Tap-O-Meter took just one month to get the green light, backed by about 40 fans on six continents. He and a team of five volunteers are now building the app's architecture.

    "It's great to see such fast results, and it's kind of amazing to have this kind of impact so early in my career," says Hutton, who is 24 and joined IBM three years ago, straight out of college. "That's not really what you would expect from a huge multinational corporation. It's very cool."