New Enterprise Idea Management software hits the market

Bwiti bvba releases Jenni entreprise idea management software today. Jenni helps firms become more innovative by capitalising on the creativity of an organisation's human resources.

(PRWEB) July 10, 2003 - Bwiti bvba (www.jpb.com) released Jenni (www.jpb.com/jenni/), the company's new enterprise idea management software today.

Enterprise idea management software is a small, but rapidly growing, area of knowledge management. But, whereas knowledge management focuses on existing information, idea management proposes future innovation. In its most basic form, Idea management software is an electronic suggestion box which allows people within organisation to propose ideas. However, almost all forms of idea management software on the market today offer many additional features to manage and develop ideas.

Jenni comprises two main sections. The user section resides on the corporate intranet and is available to everyone in the organisation. The user interface is modelled after popular interactive web sites, ensuring that users will find it intuitive – if not fun – to use. Jenni allows users to submit ideas, which are instantly available for all to see; comment on ideas, thus allowing enterprise wide collaboration; and rate ideas. Ideas are organised by categories (defined by management) and users can browse ideas by recency of submission, score and category.

One feature unique to Jenni is the request ideas feature. Anyone in the organisation who needs help solving a problem can post a request for ideas on Jenni. Users can contribute solutions. Jenni also boasts a nifty evaluation tool that allows the idea requester to scientifically evaluate proposed solutions.

Users can browse implemented ideas (ideas that management has decided to take further), where they will learn who is in charge, budget, steps of implementation and progress. Once implemented ideas are completed, they are moved to the archives together with a report. The idea archives, which are also open to all users, can be considered a library of case studies of idea implementations. And firms are recommended to submit failures as well as successes to the archives.

The IdeaMaster section of Jenni is the control centre of Jenni and is only available to management. It is here that categories are added and removed, ideas are selected for implementation and archiving and a variety of administrative tasks can be performed. Two useful features of Jenni are the user administration and the structured evaluation tool.

The user administration tool allows the IdeaMaster to monitor each user's use of Jenni: how many ideas have been submitted, average score of idea, how many comments have been contributed, how many ideas have been requested and how many solutions proposed. This allows management to identify the organisation's most innovative thinkers. This is important, according to Bwiti managing director Jeffrey Baumgartner, ...because creativity is not really quantifiable in the same way that most skills are. As a result, most firms don't often recognise their creative bright sparks; especially those who are below management level. This is a double loss for the firm. The unrecognised innovator's ideas are lost and, if the innovator's ideas are ignored for too long, she will probably get bored and look for work elsewhere."

If ideas show promise, the IdeaMaster can select them for evaluation using the structured evaluation tool. This involves clarifying aspects of the idea, indicating the criteria by which ideas should be evaluated and giving weightings to the criteria. Once this is done, evaluators are selected and invited to evaluate the ideas using the web based evaluation tool.

Assuming the evaluation results support going further with the idea, the IdeaMaster will likely implement the idea. The IdeaMaster can edit the idea, to take into consideration the evaluation results and other issues. In addition, the IdeaMaster can indicate persons responsible for the implementation, steps to be taken, deliverables and budget.

Finally, once an idea has been implemented, it can be moved to the archives which, over the long term, will become a useful resource for studying the organisation's innovation history.

Jenni is available in PHP and ASP versions and will work with most popular database servers. As a result, Jenni is highly customisable and Bwiti can modify each implementation of Jenni to meet each organisation's corporate style guidelines – to further facilitate ease of use – as well as build custom features as required. Moreover, because PHP and ASP programmers are widely available, end users can do their own customisation and experimentation with Jenni.

PHP, which is open source, makes Jenni particularly suitable for implementation in Linux environments.

Unlike most enterprise idea management products, Jenni's pricing is based on the implementation rather than the number of users. Says Baumgartner: for enterprise idea management to really work it must be available to everybody in the organisation. What many managers do not realise is that accounting people have ideas about sales, marketing people have ideas about customer service, sales people have ideas about quality control and more. If management tries to save money by only letting a select few people use Jenni, unknown creative bright sparks will remain unknown, cross-departmental idea collaboration won't happen and the potential for innovation is greatly diminished. To ensure that every implementation of Jenni is as effective as possible, I want everyone in our clients' organisations to have access."

Jenni can be implemented on the intranet for use by a single organisation or on the Internet for use by the entire value chain. Jenni can also be hosted and managed by Bwiti via Jenni Outsource" service, which can include additional services such as idea mastering, innovation coaching and more.

Bwiti bvba is a privately owned company located in Erps-Kwerps, Belgium.

For more information about Jenni or Bwiti, please contact Jeffrey Baumgartner (+32 2 251 7725; e-mail jeffreyb@jpb.com)