Buzz. Wall-E. Up. Walt Disney's Pixar is synonymous with animated films, which display creativity, magical stories, and unforgettable characters. Behind the fun of making these films, Pixar has a set of deeply rooted values that champion excellence, tap innovation, and encourage collaboration. Bill Capodagli, the co-author of Innovate the Pixar Way: Business Lessons from the World's Most Creative Corporate Playground, and co-founder of Capodagli Jackson Consulting, says, "These are just the starting points for pushing your own team or organization to unleash a Pixar-style creativity, innovation, and brilliance. From its humble beginnings in the 1990s, Pixar modeled its culture after Walt Disney's legendary studio of the 1930s. In fact, Capodagli has written one of the most authoritative books about Disney called the Disney Way. In deconstructing Pixar's success, Capodagli provides readers with a proven example of how an organization can cultivate innovative talent across all levels of employees and background.

Enterpriseleadership.org sat down with Capodagli to learn more about what fuels innovation at Pixar and how Capodagli's consulting practice applied similar techniques to technology-based organizations. Here is what he had to say:

EL. Why did you decide to write this book? 

BC. I have been studying the Disney culture more about 30 years.  I continue to speak on keynotes about Walt Disney's success. Pixar first came to our radar screen in 1995 when we were in the middle of writing the Disney Way. We watched this rather obscure boutique arise from being a subcontractor to Disney to replacing Disney animation in the late 1990s. Disney acquired Pixar in 2006 for a cool $7.4 billion. The Pixar president, the creative officer, and retired co-founder all admired and emulated Disney's creative genius. Pixar honors the legacy of Walt Disney by refusing to take short cuts and bringing the story to life in each of their movies. It lives by the simple formula that quality is your best business plan.

EL. What was your first-hand experience dealing with the Pixar folks?

BC. During the research of our book, Pixar was all consumed with the launch of UP, which ultimately got an Academy Award nomination for a feature film. We were fortunate to have one of the Pixar cofounders grant as much time as we needed to understand the inner workings of Pixar, especially how the organization was born in the spirit of collaboration and trust. We talked with other Pixar employees as their time prevailed. They shared with us some wonderful stories about the collaboration and this childlike playground Pixar has created.

EL. Can you describe some of the methods Pixar uses to innovation?

BC. The Pixar cofounders pioneered computer graphics technology back in 1974. The 1984 hiring of John Lassiter helped to bring all of the pieces together. Pixar's innovation brings technology and art together.  John was an animator and the cofounders were these computer graphics technocrats. Walt Disney said when art and technology come together magic happens. That is really Pixar's secret and that is how it works today. Everyone at Pixar works in a collaborative environment. The technical people and animators work hand and hand.

EL. If I want to make my organization more innovative, what things can I take from the Pixar innovation model?

BC. The culture of collaboration is the missing key in most organizations. At Pixar, everything revolves around the story boarding, which Walt Disney created.  In the traditional sense, it involves pinning up the story on the board and then starting to put the story together in that conceptual phase. Everyone contributes to the story during daily meetings.  In most film companies, the executive producers, directors, and some of the executives preside over the daily meeting. Everyone participates in the daily meetings at Pixar. An open discussion takes place about how they can make what they are doing better.

The brain trust is another interesting concept. Pixar has a brain trust whenever a director or a producer decides that their stock needs some input. The process includes a group of eight directors and other they would like to invite to this meeting. During the brain trust, they present segments of the film and have a lively two-hour discussion about how they can improve it. The key to the brain trust is that there are no mandatory notes, and no mandatory action. It has absolutely no authority. The director and his or her team make the changes as they see fit.

EL. Does Pixar normally have many people seeking them out for their innovation methods?

BC. I am sure they have many people seeking them out, but they are like a closed set. They are not like Disneyland or Disney World where you can visit and observe the innovation, creativity, and the customer service. They do know welcome people in to observe the process.  I have known many companies that tried to open Pixar's door.

EL. How does Pixar reward employees for outstanding innovations?  Do they have a specific rewards system?

BC. We asked the co-founder about that. The biggest reward system these people have is that they can publish their findings and their methods in technical journals and speak at technical conferences. Technical people value this more than to monetary rewards.

EL. What is the Pixar education program about?

BC. Pixar modeled its education program after Walt Disney's eight-page, 1938 memo to Don Graham. Don was an art educator in the Los Angeles area. Walt wanted his animators to, not only be technically competent in drawing, but he wanted them to be creative when they got into the story. This memo outlined ways of doing education in music and comedy and storylines as such. The two Pixar cofounders had a copy of this memo and decided this was a good way to provide an education program to everyone in the organization. As a result, everyone in the organization can take up to four hours of educational courses on company time at Pixar University. It offers more than 110 courses. They say someone can go to Pixar U as a janitor and take enough courses to obtain the equivalent of a BS in filmmaking.

EL. Can you provide an overview of your managing consulting business?

BC. I have spent most of my professional career in management consulting.  In 1980, my clients started asking us to benchmark the best-of-the-best companies. Disney would always appear at the top of the list, come up as one of the best of the best, not only in customer service, cut in areas of training, turnover, and even in production. Disney has the fifth largest laundry in the world. I have taken many clients behind the screen to Disney interviews. My firm has interviewed 1,000s of Disney employees. We started using Disney as a model for our consulting practice. In 1998, when we wrote the Disney Way, we did 90 percent consulting and about 10 percent public speaking and seminars. Because of the Disney Way, we spend more time doing the opposite.

EL. Where does the innovation initiative reside in many of your client companies?

BC. Our main thrust is to help our clients develop a culture of innovation. That means having a culture where you unleash the abilities of everyone in your organization.  Walt Disney and the cofounders of Pixar believed that innovation comes from everyone in the organization.  Because one person has the idea for a film, that person is not the only innovative genius. Rest assured that innovative ideas from everyone on the team went into making that film. Pixar promotes and encourages that. We have organization tell us that they cannot afford to have the Pixar-type innovators. We say that is not the case. 'You need to look at everyone in the organization as an innovator.' These people might not come up with the next Harry Potter novel or a flat screen TV. Instead, they need to be innovative about how they do in the cost-effective way to serve their customer.  Everyone has input into that.  Unleash that power on these things.  We encourage people to do that.

EL. Does that include IT? Is IT a different animal from everyone else?

BC. I do not think so. Pixar has taught us that the technocrats and the animators need to work in concert. One person is no more equal than another person is. In many technical organizations, engineers and IT people reign super. The production people and other support people feel like second-class citizens. In other organizations, the marketing people might have that perception.

Sure, you can train people on techniques like storyboarding, or improvisation that help stimulate those creative juices. On the other hand, everyone has a stake in helping to make people more creative. The good ideas come from everyone in the organization. We found that many of the ideas, especially in large corporations, come from the front-line people who are trying things out and saying, 'Gee, this seems to work better than what is coming from corporate. You need to unleash that capability and have a culture that nurtures that.

EL. Are you saying that storyboarding can apply to other things besides filmmaking? Have you ever applied it to IT people?

BC. Yes. I have storyboarded with many IT groups. One large IT group wanted to install a large computer system in many locations throughout a foreign country. We brought a group of 30 IT professionals from all over the world to convene at hotel for a week. We started storyboarding by throwing ideas out to the group.

To prioritize things, we said, 'What are the first things we have to do? What are the plans? How can we put it together to carry out a materials management system throughout this large organization?'  In turn, the group members put their ideas on a card, and then we posted the cards on the wall. It does not become that person's idea. The facilitator read all the cards after we presented the problem. We had a discussion around that. At the end of a week, we had this gigantic ballroom filled with cards, plans, and ideas that would have taken months to put together the comprehensive plan that emerged from this.

EL. Can you tell me more about what came out of that storyboarding?

BC. They started working on the implementation. They would meet quarterly and refine the plan-such as what barriers keep coming up? They would react according. What would normally take three years to four years to carry out took 18 months.

EL. Can you talk about another technology project you worked on?

BC. At Whirlpool Corporation, we worked with the global No-Frost team. It was very similar to this overseas IT team. The Whirlpool team had the task of designing a brand new no-frost refrigerator, along with a factory that could  be built and produce products anywhere in South America. Normally, individuals from marketing, purchasing, technology, and such would meet and say, 'You go do this and you go do that.' After a week, they would go off in their own corner of the world. Every six months, they would get together and start putting the pieces together. This process would take about four years.

This team had a 20-month time period to get this project off the ground. Instead of doing it the traditional way, we worked with this team throughout their 20 months. They brought in individuals from all over the world. They had full-time representation in Indiana.  Before they even began the project, we got together for an entire week of team building and planning. We did things similar to the IT team. We put strips of tape on the walls. We had cards and said, 'Now for January what are all of the things we need to do?'

This team came together with the common goal of getting this thing done in record time. The barrier with the organization broke down. When we had the entire plan up there, we asked everyone, 'What are the things you need to be involved in to make our goal of getting the plans for the factory and the no-frost refrigerator done on time?' We found that technicians were doing engineering tasks and purchasing people were saying, 'I could help with marketing.'  Everyone looked at accomplishing the goal rather than trying to work in his or her own silo. We had great results.  Despite a cut in the product cost half way through the project, the team still met all the milestones and deadlines.

Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a free-lance technology writer. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.

In 2004, Andrew McAfee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, wrote a case study about a Japanese taxi company that used Japan's i-mode technology to bypass the dispatch center and immediately put customers in touch with the closest cab. That case study led McAfee to search for other tools that allowed for similar interaction. Meanwhile, a student introduced McAfee to Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs and wikis, which had just started to become popular. Further research led McAfee to become a proponent of Web 2.0 tools, which he calls Enterprise 2.0. As a result, he developed a technology paradigm that companies can use to buy or build digital platforms for enabling their employees and other constituents to collaborate more freely. Each letter in his SLATES paradigm stands for the first letter in one of the six components -- search, links, authoring, tags, extension, and signals. In fact, McAfee, who is also a visiting professor at MIT's Center for Digital Business, has chronicled his findings in his forthcoming book, Enterprise 2.0 - New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenge (Harvard Business School Press).

At the MIT Sloan 2009 CIO Symposium, Enterpriseleadership.org sat down with McAfee to discuss the challenges CIOs face in making technology investments, especially in Enterprise 2.0. Here is what he had to say:

EL. Is there a correlation between a company's profitability and the amount of money it allocates annually for IT and the maturity of its IT investment process?

AMA. Those correlations tend to be very weak. Much of the research shows that the amount of money a company spends on technology is a bad indicator of how much benefit it gets out of technology and what its profitability is like. As far as we can determine, that raw investment number is not a good predictor of things we care about.

EL. Is the maturity of a company's investment process an indicator of anything significant?

AMA. Most executive teams look at capital IT investments the same way as any other capital investment. The amount of attention everyone in the company -- ranging from the executive team to business unit managers -- pays to technology issues determines the success of these investments.

EL. If technology decisions are driven from the top, is there a better chance these investments will have a high success rate?

AMA. Yes, especially if the technology investments are intended to change the business. The business side of the company doesn't get involved in things such as upgrading routers or swapping out databases. If the purpose of the technology project is to bring about change to the business, then you need to involve business people.

EL. What industry sectors have increased their technology investments and what payoffs do they expect from them?

AMA. My research shows that companies in IT-intensive industries, such as finance, have experienced turbulence and higher rates of growth concentration than non IT-intensive counterparts. You, however, have to put things into perspective. These days finance is such a strange place to do business. It is very hard to predict what is going to happen going forward. On the other hand, companies in IT-intensive industries can't switch horses in midstream and slow down their rate of investments. It might take longer, but they will realize a payoff.

EL. Are there any other companies that stand out in your mind that really exploit technology?

AMA. I did a case study about the Spanish clothing company Inditex, Europe's largest clothing retailer. Zara is this retailer's most popular brand. It is an inexpensive but fashion-forward retail chain. This company is a brilliant user of technology because it does not throw too much technology at the business. It has developed great insight into the kind of customers it wants to go after -- 20-something forward people. Trends for this market segment are hard to predict, As a result, Inditex does not do much forecasting or looking into the future with technology. Its technology enables store managers all around the world to articulate what products will sell in the next couple of weeks. The company can then design the clothes, make them, and get them to the stores quickly, thanks to a fast replenishment cycle. Inditex can take advantage of trends while they are still hot, instead of trying to predict what 20-year-olds are going to wear 18 months from now. That is impossible to do.

EL. If a company has immature technology processes, what steps can it take to catch up and move forward?

AMA. You don't begin by throwing buckets of money at the problem. The company has to make the commitment that it can catch up, especially if the company has not historically had technology as a strength. The company has to understand the needs of the business, and then look at the technology landscape to see what it needs to adopt.

EL. How does your approach to technology differ from some other approaches?

AMA. Many of the approaches have a great deal in common. We all focus on people, process and technology. Keep in mind that enterprise deployments can vary widely. You can run into different kinds of problems or pitfalls, depending on what kind of implementation you are doing. If you just do finance and human resources, you won't run into many problems. On the other hand, because technology deployments for distribution, sales, logistics and manufacturing are more complex, you will incur more risk. As a result, you need to plan these deployments carefully.

EL. What guidelines would you give CIOs about measuring the success of technology investments?

AMA.  I try to help companies understand that cost and time are not the most important criteria for measuring progress and success with technology initiatives. You need to keep your eyes on those things, but more importantly, you need to look at the business impact of IT. That is hard to measure. You need to keep your eye on achieving the objectives of the project. Is the project doing what we need it to do? If not, how can we turn it around? Is it giving us the capabilities we are after?

EL. What are some of the shortcomings of the tools and techniques large companies use to guide the capital IT investment process?

AMA. When I look around, especially at larger organizations, I see too much decentralization of decisions about technology. The governance process revolves around letting each division or business unit make a set of technology decisions. The corporate level winds up stitching all of these technology decisions together. That's hard to do. You wind up with a fragmented technology environment riddled with inconsistent business processes and inconsistent data. You can't drive the enterprise, never mind see what is going on. I tend to advocate more centralized governance around the enterprise decision-making approach. It doesn't mean that headquarters makes all of the business decisions. You just try to layer and place some consistent technology across the company.

EL. Many companies use an ROI approach for measuring technology investments. Is that a good metric for technology projects?

AMA. It is tempting to try to turn a predicted ROI number into a business case in advance for a technology project. These numbers are extraordinarily speculative. At the start, people come up with whatever number they want. I don't advocate that companies spend much time on that. Whenever I have a chance to talk to companies which do technology well, I ask them about creating a business case and coming up with an ROI. Many of these companies say they don't focus their energy on these things. Instead, they focus their energy on making sure they select the right technologies. They watch their budgets carefully so they don't spend more than they anticipated.

EL. Your forthcoming book, Enterprise 2.0, outlines your concept, called SLATES. Can you give examples of organizations that are moving in that direction?

AMA. The 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, including the FBI and the CIA, really surprised me. They have deployed a consistence suite of 2.0 tools that have all of the SLATES elements. This toolset has started to change how some of the analysts go about their work. This is good news. Perhaps the federal intelligence agencies could have prevented the September 11 disaster if they would have been able to connect the dots among all of the people and all of the pieces of information throughout the community. The intelligence community's Enterprise 2.0 platform, called Intellipedia, provides a consistent internal blogging environment. It has something for tagging, such as an internal del.icio.us. It comes pretty close to comprising the entire SLATES complement.

EL. What companies are embracing Enterprise 2.0?

AMA. Many of the high-tech companies are doing many aspects of Enterprise 2.0.Sony is a big user of these tools. You also see unusual industry sectors, such as insurance, embracing Enterprise 2.0. In fact, Northwestern Mutual Life is a big Enterprise 2.0 user. Other heavy uses of Enterprise 2.0 include Procter & Gamble and Pfizer.

EL. What must proactive CIOs need to be thinking about in order to move in the direction of Enterprise 2.0? What challenges do they face in that area?

AMA. The main challenge is for CIOs to get out of the way. If you want to control events and control outcomes, you have to give up control of people and trust them. Enterprise 2.0 technologies put that philosophy to the test. If CIOs want to be successful with Enterprise 2.0, they need to trust that people will use the tools appropriately and encourage them to lead by example. CIOs need to stop trying to be interventionist managers. CIOs should deploy the tools, model the correct behaviors, and have some faith that good things will happen as a result.

EL. Can you summarize what C-level executives will learn from your book?

AMA. They will learn what is new under the sun. The 2.0 suffix is not hype. There really is a new set of tools out there. They will learn what those tools are, what characteristics they have in common, and how organizations are deploying them and distilling lessons about how to profit from this new opportunity going forward.

EL. Can you describe some of these tools?

AMA. All of these tools have SLATES elements, such as blogs and virtualization. They tend to social- or community-based. Overall, they tend not to tell your role in the workflow. They do not impose a business process. For example, wikis and Wikipedia are good examples here. We used to think that if you wanted a high-quality encyclopedia article, you needed to assign people into roles and walk them through a very specific workflow for generating a good article. Wikipedia comes along and shows you don't need to do any of that. Instead, you can tap into a huge amount of energy out there to write articles, share knowledge and just be helpful. You can generate the world's largest encyclopedia. By some measures, Wikipedia is a good encyclopedia developed by not dictating terms to people.

Whenever I do seminars on Enterprise 2.0, I ask audience members how many regularly use used Wikipedia. Almost every hand in the room goes up. I then ask if it is the first place they click on to start learning about new topics. Again, almost every hand in the room goes up. I ask people to think about how remarkable that is because it has no formal editors' staff. Any one of us can make changes to almost any article. The lack of formal ground lines is bizarre. My point stresses that this experience is not an accident -- it is what is key to what is going on right now. The new technology toolkit is a great assistant and a great help for open innovation.

EL. What are some of the benefits organizations will get from SLATES?

AMA.  They can come away with a better product than they would have otherwise had. For example, they can take advantage of new ideas that they did not expect, such as a customer who offers an idea for how to improve the product. This process gets built into the way the company does business. It can help to generate revenues.

EL. Does SLATES change the organizational culture?

AMA. It does not have to change the formal organizational structure. I keep stressing that the results of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities are an alternative to the formal organization; i.e., having a formal organization chart, a boss and a hierarchy. Call it a complement, if you will, because it is in addition to all the formal business processes and the hierarchy of the organization. As you deploy these tools over time, they will start to change the culture a little bit, and people will start to think in a more democratic way about many issues. It is not this deep threat to the existing organization and the existing hierarchy.

EL. Some companies have devised their own internal version of LinkedIn or Facebook. Don't those social media projects cut across organizational boundaries?

AMA. Absolutely! These technologies inherently do not respect organizational boundaries. They do not care what business unit, division, or geography you are part of. As a result, these technologies enable you to bring together a globally disbursed workforce to look at problems and to contribute knowledge to share what they know. It cuts across organization boundaries, but let us be clear: We already have technologies, like telephone and email, which are equally indifferent to those kinds of things.

Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a free-lance writer and IT consultant from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.

Accenture ranks as one of the largest global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing companies. In 2001, Accenture's IT organization supported 75,000 employees. Today, that number is 178,000 employees. Meanwhile, company revenues have gone from $11.5 billion in 2001 to $19 billion in 2007. By moving both IT service delivery and many internal business transactions to an online, self-service model and consolidating key applications, Frank Modruson, Accenture's CIO, says that his company will spend 30 percent less in real dollars in 2008. "As a percent of revenue per person, we've cut IT by 60 percent. That's a dramatic a reduction to the cost to serve."

Enterpriseleadership.org sat down with Frank Modruson, Accenture's chief information officer, to discuss how IT has cut costs but improved service delivery to internal customers. Here's what Modruson had to say in his second interview with www.enterpriseleadership.org.

EL. What improvements have you made to become more responsive to your internal customers?

FB. We've always focused on this as a priority. As the capabilities have evolved over time, we've had the opportunity to take it to the next level. All of our internal business transactions at Accenture happen online. We're a virtually paperless company. It doesn't mean we don't print paper, but all of your transactions as a business customer, whether it's changing your address or looking at your pay stub, occur online in a self-service model similar to the way you'd do any e-commerce transaction. For example, when you create a time report at Accenture, you create an online document, but you're really creating a transaction. We view that as being very customer centric.

When it comes to IT, we handle more than 40 percent of our helpdesk calls online in this self-service model. If you go to esupport, you can look up your problem, read about a solution, or escalate to a chat directly with the helpdesk via Instant messenger.

EL. Given that Accenture is an IT delivery company, what types of online services do you provide your external customers?

FB. First, we call our external customers clients. We don't do many things for them online because of the nature of our work. We have Accenture.com and other content sites about our business. We offer our clients micro sites that we'll tailor to them or to their industry. That's where it is ends. We've been racking our brains about what other online things we can do for them.

IT is trying to bridge the technology gap differently with our clients. For example, we've developed 12 telepresence sites internally. While I was speaking to a client about planning his trip to visit our facility in India, I told him that he might want to get on our telepresence link from Chicago to Bangalore and plan the trip that way. In fact, I added that he might consider conducting the visit via telepresence rather than traveling to India. This client was incredibly enthusiastic about them.

EL. What is your IT strategy and how does it to contribute to making Accenture a leaner, more efficient organization?

FB. Our IT strategy focuses on serving the business of Accenture by looking to make it more efficient and effective. To me, IT is about taking out the friction of our business and making it easier and easier to do the work of Accenture. One the key points in our strategy is to have a single instance of key applications globally. To this end, we only have one application to serve the entire organization for any particular functional area. We have one set of financials for the world. All of the transactions reside in the one system. You can drill down to any level of detail you want. You'll find one version of the truth. We don't have anyone saying this's what my report says and it doesn't agree with what your report says. Companies that have this scenario end up reconciling all the different reports to find the truth.

We also have one recruiting system and one scheduling system. If you go down the list, you'll find that we have one of anything. As a result, our data is cleaner because there are no discrepancies where this system has these fields and this other system has different fields. If you try to put these systems together, you have a problem.

EL. How do companies fall into the trap of redundant systems?

FB. Several years, we brought in a consultant to help us lead a strategic procurement project. I asked her how our technology compared with other companies she had done work for. She said that most companies begin the process by collecting all of the procurement transactions from all of the different systems, put the data altogether to try to make sense of it, and then do the analysis. We said that we skipped that step because we already had all of the data in one place. She said most companies don't understand how big a deal that is.

Here's how people fall into that trap. If everyone has their system, they do get their data faster. However, it doesn't work holistically across the company. You create a Tower of Babel where everything has a different name in each part of the world. It becomes difficult to get everyone to talk with each other. That's why we have companies with multiple ERP systems. I've heard of companies with 70 instances of their primary ERP. You wind up hosting 70 ERP systems, and you wind up reconciling all of these individual ERP systems to get total revenue. Accenture has one ERP system.

EL. What types of social networking or collaboration tools have you given your internal customers?

FB. This is a major program for us. We've launched Accenture Collaboration 2.0 to provide our internal customers with the next generation of social networking capabilities, similar to popular We-based sites such as Facebook. For example, in Accenture People Pages, employees can post their photo, a biography, a resume, and personal information, such as hobbies and interests. They can also list their areas of expertise, who they've worked with, and what things they have contributed to the Accenture Knowledge Exchange. Anyone can free text search this customized, extensible profile of our employees. IT contributed all of the base information, such as employee's name, address, phone number, and email address, but then we told employees to put in what they wanted.

We also have a media exchange similar to a Youtube for all of our media. We're doing an expert's page. We've introduced video from telepresence down to video on the desktop. We're deploying Office Communicator that will tie in Instant messenger, email, phone, and video -- all on the desktop. Since we have one Active Directory, one global email system, and one global desktop, our rollout of this Office Communicator will be straightforward.

EL. How are employees using these collaborative tools to make their job easier?

FB. We want people to cut through the company's hierarchy when they're searching for information and capabilities. People can locate expertise around the firm rather than going up and down the hierarchy of the person they report to. For example, when I did a free-text search on People Pages to find employees who have wine and beverage industry experience, I got 768 hits matching wine. I narrowed the search and found some people who had beverage, wine, and spirits brand management experience. If I go to Office Communicator, I can then check the presence indicator next to each picture. The indicator tells me if the person is online and available or not. Because I see the person's calendar, I know when he or she has a meeting or will be free. If the person is online and available, I can go ahead and contact the person via either Instant messenger, email, or telephone. This capability breaks down the barriers because we can just click on the person and reach out to them. We're trying to make it seamless for our people to get connected to the technology and then to make the experience better. We're trying to bring the power of 178,000 employees to each employee.

EL. Have you improved the way your employees search for documents on the Accenture Knowledge Exchange?

FB. We've added a new, enhanced search and preview feature. Our old search feature was similar to google.com. If your search found documents, such as PDFs, you had to search again on the term to find the page you want. With preview, you see a picture of the page in the document that has your search term. If Accenture is on page 32 of a 50-page document, then you see page 32 highlighted.

EL. What has been the most unusual experience with social networking?

FB. We put up a Wikipedia on Accenture so employees can add their entries about Accenture. Meanwhile, we launched an application, a social network experiment, call Percenture, which tells you the percentage of employees who've joined the company after you did. It also gives you a perspective about the size of the company, where you are, and how long you have been with the company. We didn't post it anywhere on any of our applications. We sent it to out to people via email. In the next 24 hours, more than 30,000 people hit it.

A couple of weeks later while I was speaking to a 100 people, someone asked me where he could find the link to Percenture. I said that because Percenture was an experiment, we didn't post it anywhere. One person raised his hand and said that the link was in the Wikipedia. Apparently, someone went into the Accenture entry and created a link to Percenture. The person who knew where the link was had been with the company for just two months. He knew to look there because of his online experience outside of the company. The best part of it is that someone created the entry for it.

EL. What unique wireless tool have you given employees who travel?

FB. We have a utility that allows employees to get connect to a wireless hot bus around the world. When I was going through Toyko Airport, I opened my laptop, and connected immediately without exchanging any credit card information. This utility just works.

EL. How do go about looking at the right technology mix for your internal customers?

FB. We do a variety of things. We have a portfolio management process for our applications. We manage those applications as products as we work with the customers they support. We do the same thing with our infrastructure. We channel initial funding requests through our IT steering committee, which I chair. The committee includes the chief operating officers of Accenture's operating groups, and the chief operating officers for internal functions for HR, strategy, and finance. Everyone gets one vote. We go through all of the project requests, and then prioritize them based on the importance to the business. Our portfolio management system tracks all of these products.

EL. What determines a successful product?

FB. Before any project gets going or funded, we put together the business case, which includes the cost to do the work and the expected business benefits both in hard dollars and in soft benefits that have some metrics attached to them. Once any project goes into production, we monitor attainment or realization of benefits against that original business case. We do this for three years. Once a year we have an internal audit to look at the process of measurement, to select business cases, and to report those findings to the IT steering committee right before we do funding for the next year.

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Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.