The Sentient Enterprise

CHAPTER 5The Collaborative Ideation Platform

We’re now well on our way in the Sentient Enterprise journey to maturing analytics at scale as we grow our businesses. In Stage 1, we built the foundation for managing data by creating the Agile Data Platform. In Stage 2, we introduced the Behavioral Data Platform to harness that added dimension of possibilities within the vast world of human- and sensor-driven behavioral data. Despite having these agile systems and the capacity in place to support such a rich analytics environment, however, we’re still left with a lot of complexities that can stymie progress.

Remember that a chief mandate is not just to engage a broad range of users in analytics, but to ensure that they can work and innovate together. Too much data and too many insights that aren’t coordinated or vetted for value can quickly become barriers to this collaboration. The only way to survive as we scale our businesses is to foster an analytics environment where a lot of different people can collaborate and share ideas. It’s no secret, then, that we chose the “Collaborative Ideation Platform” as our name for Stage 3 of the Sentient Enterprise journey.

This chapter deals with how to set up this Collaborative Ideation Platform for agile, intuitive, and crowdsourced cooperation throughout the organization in ways that remain simple and intuitive, even at scale. We’ll learn how to leverage the LinkedIn- and Facebook-style social media conventions we previewed in Chapter 2 ...