Case Summary
With 43,000 frontline employees dispersed at airports nationwide, the Transportation Security Administration identified Web 2.0 technology as a promising way to harness the collective wisdom of this workforce with the purpose of generating strategies to improve the agency's mission performance. Launched on April 25, 2007, IdeaFactory is a secure intranet site that allows employees to offer suggestions for improving TSA. As of March 2008, employees had submitted over 4,500 ideas and offered more than 39,000 comments. Quite impressively, an estimated 20 ideas solicited from IdeaFactory have already been implemented by the TSA as national policy.
Business Challenge
The Transportation Security Administration
(TSA) wanted to harness the collective wisdom of their security officer workforce (TSOs) to generate innovative strategies for improving the agency's mission performance. While TSA initially experimented with webcasts, town halls and other initiatives to foster officer engagement, Administrator Kip Hawley acknowledges retrospectively that "I honestly didn't feel like it moved the needle that much."1 Consequently, with approximately 43,000 frontline employees dispersed at airports nationwide, TSA identified a mass collaboration platform as a tool well-suited to achieving this goal.2
Approach Taken
On April 25, 2007 TSA launched IdeaFactory, a secure intranet online forum where TSOs can offer suggestions for improving agency operations.3 The site allows users to offer and build upon ideas for everyone to evaluate. Quite importantly, all comments are user attributable, which is designed to make employees accountable for their contributions. Proposed ideas are ultimately voted on by fellow TSOs, with the most popular ideas becoming spotlighted as best ideas. From there TSA's Innovation Council reviews these ideas weekly, discusses which could ultimately be implemented on a national level.4
Results Achieved
According to Kip Hawley, IdeaFactory has been particularly successful in regards to quantity of usage, with an estimated 6,000 TSOs visiting the site at any given time.5 By March 2008, TSA employees had submitted over 4,500 ideas, offered more than 39,000 comments, and added approximately 58,000 posts to vote for specific suggestions. Even more significantly, approximately 20 proposed policies generated from IdeaFactory have been implemented by TSA on a national level.6
Predictably, employees have occasionally violated the terms of use, resulting in suspension from the forum. But the strong return-on-investment TSA managers already see in maintaining an open employee forum is evidenced in that fact no violators have seen their employment status affected due to their incendiary comments.
Lessons Learned
TSA officials find that user attributable comments have allowed IdeaFactory to be self-policing. Kip Hawley underscored the importance of this lesson when he remarked at a NAPA Collaboration Projection Kickoff meeting in February 2008 that "We found that the lighter touch on editing, the better the quality of ideas and the better quality of discussion."7 In terms of external replication of IdeaFactory at other organizations, Hawley remarked during this same conference that the technology behind the site is neither complicated nor expensive, and thus the biggest challenge is that "somebody has to make the decision to go ahead and do it."8
References
1. Ben Bain, '4 studies in collaboration—Case 2: TSA's IdeaFactory,' FCW.Com, March 3, 2008.
2. Frank DiGiammarino and Lena Trudeau, 'Virtual Networks: An Opportunity for Government,' Public Manager, Spring 2008.
3. Jennifer Dorn, 'Rebooting the Public Square,' FCW.Com, December 3, 2007.
4. Ben Bain, '4 studies in collaboration—Case 2: TSA's IdeaFactory.'
5. 'TSA's Kip Hawley Featured at Collaboration Project Inaugural Meeting,' http://collaborationproject.org, Audio Highlights: Kip Hawley discusses how the IdeaFactory helped TSA's front-line officers improve their skills on the job.
6. Ben Bain, '4 studies in collaboration—Case 2: TSA's IdeaFactory.'
7. 'TSA's Kip Hawley Featured at Collaboration Project Inaugural Meeting,' http://collaborationproject.org, Audio Highlights: The TSA Administrator discusses how IdeaFactory postings undergo minimal editing from site monitors.
8. 'TSA's Kip Hawley Featured at Collaboration Project Inaugural Meeting,' http://collaborationproject.org, Audio Highlights: Hawley says success involves both technology and leadership.
