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Event ID: 1488645 Event Started: 1/21/2010 4:00:00 PM
Please stand by for a realtime transcript. Welcome to our webinar. I wanted to before
we get started. I wanted to let everyone know a few logistical information, everyone is
on mute. If you have a question, put it in the chat box on your control panel. Tina will
be taking questions after her presentation. Also for example you are having technical
difficulties please contact Darryl diamond at 202-208-0668. Or email web manager University
at GSA .gov. Before we introduce Tina, I would like to introduce Rachel flag, she is co-chair
of the federal web managers council. >> Thanks, good morning everyone. We are delighted
to have Tina, TSA here to talk about -- the ibf factory. Have brief news items. Fist sup
coming web manager University clays. We have a ton of great classes coming up over the
next few weeks. Topics include usability, writing for the web, blogging for engagement,
crisis communication by social media and lots more. We also have note that registration
is open for annual government web managers conference, it will be held the last week
of April. If you want to register, go to the community calendar on the site or web manager
University and register on line there. Some more applications we are have been working
with vendors to get government vendor terms of service agreements. Apps posted now or
will be posted shortly include social text, internal social networking and blogging tool.
Social twists, bookmarking sharing tool. Couple other things, and let's see a lot of things
going on. Google moderator and analytics also. Google tool has cookies, be aware. Last one
is idea skill, terms of service agreement. I deal skill, some of you may have heard that
and part of the open government effort, some agencies required to post some sort of on
line citizen engagement tool to collect public feed back about open government plans. GSA
has developed a tool that idea skill and agencies required to use the too are on board and working
with ideal skill, and we will have more information about that available to you probably tomorrow.
Just wanted to make it clear that the ideal school is not the same thing as ideal factory,
which we are talking about today with Tina. Make sure you don't get those two confused.
The open government efforts, we send out a note yesterday with heads up that we have
been working like crazy to get guidance on open government and web related elements of
the open government directive and how to help our agency to meet the open government goals.
We will be putting up a page tomorrow that has a ton of information about the agency/open
pages, points of contacts for the different pieces of the open government plan, a ton
of Info. Look for message coming out in the email tomorrow with a link to the page. Okay.
We will turn it over the Tina from TSA. TSA just done a terrific job of not only engaging
employees of ideal factor but one of the models within government for the TSA blog, which
they used successfully to get collect feed back from the public about the airline screening
process and all the ways TSA works with the public. Ideal factory is a tool TSA developed
to reach out to employees and to help improve the way that their agency operates. So it
has all sorts of proud sourcing and ideal sourcing and networking elements. Tina will
be showing us some screen shots of the tool and talking about how they implement it and
use it within the organization to improve their operations in day-to-day work. One thing
that is so key to the success of ideal factory is the technology is important, even more
important is what you do with the information that you collect using that technology. I
think TSA has been a model for taking the input that people give them and acknowledging
that people took the time to comment, responding to those comments, being really open and transparent
about what they are going to do with comments and suggests and if they can fix sync they
will, if they can't, they explain why. As Tina talks, you will have similar good models
to follow. Excuse me, if you are planning to implement some sort of engagement tool
for the public, TSA is a great model for all of us to follow. They've done a terrific job.
With that I will turn it over to Tina. Take it away Tina.
>> Thank you so much for nice enter duction and having me on today's. I look forward to
sharing more about ideal factory with everyone. Can everyone see the slides okay?
>> Yep. >> Okay. Great. So as Rachel already mentioned,
I'm going cover a little bit about what ideal factory is, how it works, walk through screen
shots. >> Talk about the life psychiatricel of an
idea that works its way through our process. Talk a little bit ate bow the success we had
with it and move in to a best practices lessoning learned section. Crowd sourcing initiative
like ideal factory and discuss lessons learned in managing an effort like this. As Rachel
mentioned, this is geared towards employees but a lot of the same principles hold regardless
of whether you are focusing on employees, or citizens or other stake -- holders, any
tips could be used for tips. Also a section on more information. The first section is
what is ideal factory. Quite simply ideal factory is a web based tool that allows all
of our TSA employees to submit ideas on how we can do things better provment stride comments
on the ideas to improve them. They can rate the ideas on a scale of 1-5. We know which
ones are being seen as important by the work force in terms of which ones should be implemented.
Takes traditional suggestion box and allow us to harness the wisdom of the crowds to
identify which ideas are most important. I think I always like to highlight vision statement,
it's to support TSA's mission by fostering a community that engages employees and encourages
collaboration to initiate innovative change . I think it's important to note that it's
not just a site that's fun and allows people to chat with each other. It supports the agency
mission. Goal of ideal factory is to get good ideas that we can implement to make tasa affective
agency. We are allowing employee to connect with engowrnlging collaboration both between
front line work force and senior leaders here at headquarters and between the users of the
site as well as the folks here within the program offices that help evaluate and responds
to those ideas. It also uses familiar social media concept to engage users so. We designed
a site in a way that it's familiar to people. There is no training that people need before
they can use the site. It's intuitive. There is components that are similar to facebook
and linked in in terms of allowing people to sort of learn a little bit more about each
other, personalize their posts, there is also elements similar to blogger and dig where
people can rate and comment on ideas. Sort of have conversation with each other within
the context of generating ideas to better the workplace. Now I'm going to go in to more
detail on how ideal factory works. When someone accesss the site, there is a link actually
directly from the home page of intranet that takes them to what we call our landing page.
The landing page is because people are authenticated to the ideal factory application, it's available
only to employees, they are authenticated based on log in to network. They don't have
a separate user and pass word. We use landing page and ask people to agree terms of use
before I enter the site. Terms of use are basically keep things professional, no personal
attacks or profanity. It's actually longer document than that. But that's kinds of the
general gist of what we require people to dodo when they are posting on the site. We
also use this page as a way to post updates, new ideas we responded to, new challenges,
news or information we want to pass onto the work force. We update this on a regular basis.
Once they agree to Terps of use they move in to the site. This is the main page of what
they see. You can see that it has across the top, there is various tabs with functionality,
we are looking at the main ideas page, you can see it's welcoming me personally, and
telling me what I behavior is on the site. It says overall what we have done in it did
of how many ideas, how many ratings and comments total are on the site. It lists ideas in reverse
or reverse chronological order. You can get a sense of what people have rated that idea,
how popular it is. We will go in to more tail on the next couple of slides about, that I
wanted to show you in general. Left hand side is search and filter. In the upper left happened
Conn ser a big red box that says build new idea here rmt when someone clicks on that,
they get to build new idea screen. Here, we really encourage employees to look at issues
wholistically, we ask questions about who the idea addresses what the risks and benefits
are. Trying to get them to build solutions and not just identify problems. We also try
to keep it relatively simple. We don't require them to answer each of the specific questionsment
it's a general text box that says my idea is dot, dot, dot, where they can input the
idea. Users don't have a lot of time, they are not sitting in front of a computer, they
are working at check points and screening the baggage. When they access the computer
it's before or after a shift or during a break, so they really don't have a lot of time. We
wanted to make it easy for them to post. I wanted to mention we don't allow people to
post Anonymously. All the posts have the user names associated with them so we know who
is posting what. They post directly to the site. We don't review it or filler it prior
to being posted on the site. We look at it after it's posted though. We also have a number
of categories that people can select to sort of categorize their idea. We allow them to
select up to three. From time to time, we will issue a challenge senior leadership might
be looking at a specific issue and want to get the work force input on something. We
will enter that as a temporary category. Sometimes they will see a challenge category they can
respond to as well. When we first launched the site we noticed that people tended to
post more of the complaint and then a nugget of idea at the end of the post. And we really
did a campaign on turning your problem in to a solution, focusing on my idea is, prefacing
the text box and adding the questions. That really helped us you know gather the right
types of information that we were looking for. Once the idea is posted on the site all
of the users can interact with the idea and also rate it and comment on it. You can see
this idea here there is a tool box directly underneath the idea and this allows people
to email the idea to a friend, but also add it as a favorite and they can subscribe for
aleforts. We destein features knowing that people respect sitting in front of the computers.
If they have an idea they want to track they can add it to favorites list or know something
changed or added to their idea they can easily get an email alert so they can check when
the new informs is there for them. Report abuse button. Ace mentioned, because we don't
prescreen the ideas we want today give people a way of are porting abuse if they saw something
that was abuse to our terms of use, that email gets sent to the ideal factory team, we we
decide if it's abuse, we terminate it from the site and notify the user. The rating and
comment row. Mouse over a lightbulb and identify, whether it's one, two three, four or five,
one lightbulb means the user doesn't think it be p will work. Rating history. You can
get a sense of the breakout. If it has an average score. See if people all given ate
three or half the people gave ate five and half the people gave it a one. Try to figure
out what the difference is. There is also comments, on this ideas you can leave a comment
to easter make the idea better -- either make the idea better, offer a ditch view point
or simply interact or comment back and forth with the other users on the site. This next
slide, slide 11 shows more about the comments. We added some functionality around marking
the comments that's unhelpful, you can report abuse on a comment if you see a comment that
you think is unprofessional. It's important to note you can sort the comments by the date
they were submitted by the user name and by helpfulness and the ones with most responses,
they can have Neste Oiled conversations within the comment. Nice because a lot of times you
might see an idea that is very extreme and the comments really help balance out that
viewpoint, or someone might say my idea is xyz and then the users will respond back and
say this is possible. Have you looked at this web page to get more information about what
you are looking for. They use it as a way to educate each other. The next slide is I'm
going to spend a little bit of time on this slide. This is ideal evaluation process. What
happens is users submit the ideas, we get roughly 300 a month. We kind of let them percolate
a while, see which is getting most comments and check the ratings. We have experts on
my team that help review the ideas and decide which ones need to be Ford forwarded along
to the program subject matter expert for a detailed evaluation. We also have a threshold
at which we guarantee to the users that we will review and respond to idea. That was
an idea suggested by a user. All ideas reviewed go to the specific program offices. We have
roughly 50 ideas a month that make their way for the formal review. The program office
let's us know if the eye is something that they want to implement, if it is, we pull
together our cross team of experts we call our ideal factory review board. They meet
by weekly and review the ideas to make sure that while you might think the idea only relates
to one office, often times, we will have a representative from legal, there is somebody
from cfo's office to make sure we have the budget to do it. Somebody from safety making
sure there is no safety concerns. We have a vary of folks on the team that really thoroughly
look at the idea to make sure that it kind of passes everybody's criteria for an idea
that should be implemented. If it's an idea that we are not implementing, then we will
post a response as to why we can't do the idea, or where they can find additional information
about the idea if it's one that we may be working on and they don't know about. If it
is an idea we implement, go to the green box at the bottom we will transition to implementation
and make sure that the program manager is aware of everything that happened in terms
of comments that were made by the team. Any comments or suggests that were submitted on
the site, then we recognize the idea submitter and communicate the results. We actually have
changed our process, we have been in existence for three years now. We have evolved our process
over time, initially we had a team of folks that met and we pulled down a number of ideas
from the site every week and as we grew we realized that the ideas were so varied every
week in terms of what what being suggested by the work force we couldn't have enough
subject matters, experts sit in the room to provide the level of expertise we needed to
have a fruitful discussion. So we changed the process a little bit. That was a good
way to start the process, it got the program officer involved. We given them more ownership
and tell us what ideas to implement. The cross functional team actually reviews less ideas
but more of the ideas that we implement that we talk about as a team. So I thinkist important
to mention that it's an organization wide process. Not just my team of people to review
and decide if we are implementing the ideas, we need program experts to weigh in and give
us their opinion as to what we move forward with. As well as senior leadership approval.
For these ideas. I think it's important to mention that accountability is key. For our
experts that help us review the ideas, ideal factory is not their full time job in many
cases it's a collateral duty. We use a charter siped by the acting administrator at TSA to
give some weight to our groups we use regular dash boards we send to the senior leadership
team, where their liaisons are doing in terms of providing was the input and responses that
we need. We have a letter of commitment, we do briefings to senior leadership team letting
them know about our progress. On the right hand side you see the pencil coming down that
says hot topics. From time to time there are things that we will see on the site that we
forward to the specific program office for immediate attention. Might be more of work
force polls, getting a sense of what the work force things about issues, if there is change
in what we are doing. Check points we might see that we might want to send to the program
office to provide additional guidance to the work force to let them know about what is
happening. We saw this a lot with H1N1 in the fall. People having a lot of ideas and
questions about response to the H1N1 and what they could do. We were sending that to the
task force that was working on that issue. the next slide actually shows your various
statuses. I mentioned we respond to the ideas that we either do, which is the one in the
-- middle, this is the status we post. We have the ability to post sort of a official
response on the idea. If it's an idea in action we will let them know we are implementing
our idea, you should hear more next month. Here are the specifics on who is working on
the idea. If it's one in the review, what office is look at it, current activity we
will send them to a web site to learn more information. Or find out more about that idea.
We have a myth buster category from time to time we will have somebody post an idea that's
just simply not true, we like to refute whatever they are saying. And provide the facts. We
have a not able to implement. This one I think is important because we try to provide as
much information as possible as to why we can't implement the idea instead of saying
no. The work force appreciates this. So a few other aspects of the site I wanted to
talk about are the search and filler. I show this on the first page. This really allows
users to see the information in the way they want to see it. They can do keyword searches
and search by the statuses. If they want to see everything under review or everything
that's currently in action. They can look by their activity on the site. What are the
ideas they built. How are those ideas doing. They can search by category. If there is a
specific category. Say they work in baggage and interest fed the baggage related ideas
they can finds. That and sort to get a sense of the hot ideas on the site. They can see
which ones have the most comments the last week to get a sense of what the hot topics
are. We finds this to be a helpful way for people to find the ideas that are useful to
them. rs As I mentioned at the beginning, we have some characteristics of the site that
are similar to linked to facebook. Profile tab allows users to tell them about themselves.
We are asking them where the airport they are located at what their title is, affiliations
they might have. Certain groups they might belong to at the airport. We have the section
on statistics. We can see what they have done on the site and what other people done with
the ideas. This allows us to say to see who some of the thought leers are out there. They
can view list here any ideas they subscribed to, favorites, sign up for category alert.
If they are interested in baggage they can get alert email letting them know when a new
idea has been posted in the category and add a signature to the post. A lot of users were
signing their posts with their name, their title and their airport. So we said let's
add a signature field to make it easier for people to do that. What was interest second
that people started putting quotes or favorite comments from their movies that they like
in there. It gave us a aspect of the site we needed to moderate. It gave us a incite
in to their personality. They liked the chance to express that as well. Another new feature
we added recently to the site they wanted to highlight was our we ask you tab. This
actually a feature that was suggested by a user and it allows head gaiters to post ideas
that we are considering, perhaps policy change or something that we are interested in doing
here from a headquarters perspective and get field input before we roll it out. We find
this to be a helpful way of interacting with the field. We can embed video and audio clips
in to the site. This screen tab for example shows acting administrator asking the field
what makes a good employee advisory council at an airport. We got a number of suggests
and we were able to highlight the ones that we thought were the best. That was a great
way to engage with the employees. We also use a variety of communication techniques
to reach our employees, we know that they are not sitting in front of a computer, we
use posters for the break room, and newsletters, we use the landing page and a variety of share
point sites that communicate information to our poc. S in the field that are regular basis.
We really try to keep in mind that their time is limited and valuable and try to target
the communication to them as much as possible. In terms of rewards and recognition, use a
variety of mostly kind of recognition tactics, if someone has an idea we implement we send
them a certificate signed by acting administrator, a TSA coin, we also have a let their goes
to their federal security director, at their airport that says we implemented so and so's
idea, please recognize him or her in a public matter in front of his or her peers by presenting
him with this coin and certificate. We send out email from our team directly to that person
and a broadcast email to the entire work force, letting them know that this person from this
airport has an idea we are implementing, here is more informs about the idea. In some cases
we might have somebody from senior leadership to call them. Specifically if they won a challenge
issued by the executive. We might often have the winner or the perp who has an idea we
implement come to headquarters and help work on the the implementation plan for his or
her idea. And we also have had senior leadership visit the airport if they were going there
for a trip regardless, they might pay special attention to that person while they are at
the airport. We had a one time only challenge where we asked users to send ideas for how
to save money. We got over 600 ideas. We are in the pilot phase for the the does p or so
finalists now. We have a management directive and we can give people a percentage of savings
for ideas that they suggest if it meets certain criteria. For this challenge only we offered
a monetary reward. We actually have four people that mor tore the site and put ideas in to
action. Program management, analyzing evaluating the ideas, making sure that the processes
are optimized to get as many ideas through the process. Moderating the site on a regular
basis and doing strategic communications to keep everybody up to date with what is happening.
I think it's important to mention on the this site that four is not the magic number. This
is what we found works for us. We scaled up over time. When we started there was one or
two of us, we were overwhelmed and added a couple of people to the team to the point
where we kind of felt like we had things under control. It was a good manageable number.
We sit in a team room without walls to chat and interact with each other. I think one
person could do all of these things if depending on the size of the audience and amount of
ideas coming in. I wanted to mention that. In terms of our successes that we had, our
statistics show we get ten ideas a day, each idea has an average of 8 comments and 30 readings,
some might have hundreds, others might have a couple. We get new users to the site on
a continue yule basis. 40% of them are actively doing something. Submitting idea, commenting
or rating. As of the beginning of this year we had over 10,000 ideas, 84,000 comments
and 300,000 ratings. And so far 28,000 people have accessed the site. Ey everyone mented
over 50 programs -- implemented 50 programs as a result of the site and rerespondsed to
7 or 800 of the ideas to let them know where we stand with them. Here are ideas, we created
job swap web site that allows transportation security officers to identify if they are
interested in moving to a new location and they can swap with someone else in that location.
We have made a number of changes to training modules and various screening procedures.
I can't goo in to a whole lot of detail, family friendly lane as at the check points. One
I like to highlight is the public web site clarity. That we were getting posting a lot
of comments, we had something on our web site that said that parents could bring liquids
through over the 3.4-ounce limit for their children. That was exemption. We had security
officers saying people were trying to bring in soda for teenagers claiming that the web
site says it's okay. We made a quick change on the web site to change children to infant/toddler
and that made a world of difference. These are a few examples of some of the ideas we
implemented. The next slide talks about our successes we -- employees are able to actively
contribute on topics that are tied to our priorities in various initiatives that we
are working on. They created a on line community where they are talking with each other as
well as educating and informing each other, we are getting specific program feedback on
things that we are doing at headquarters, we are marketing it to headquarters, sort
of a google, put your program name in to the search field and you will see wealth of information.
We also had a survey we did last year that's the quotes at the bottom came from the survey.
People think it empowers them to improve their job. They are connected to a bigger picture.
It's keeping them up to day folks on the survey said that two-thirds of the respondents found
ideal factory to be beneficial important and strategic. Last year we were featured in the
White House open government innovation gallery as a model of open government. We are in the
prose sf rolling out ideal factory across homeland security. Now I'm going switch over
to sort of five tips for establishing a sourcing initiative. I think this is for internal/external
initiatives like this, for any social media initiative. Identify your business need. When
we launched in April 2007, we had a large work force, 50,000 people. 450 airports across
the country, we needed a way to give them a voice and how to evolve as an agency. We
are a security agency and needed to affectively mitigate security threats expe involve and
work force screens 2 million flying passengers each day, that's a huge source of information
to do that. Information is a core value. We wanted to walk the talk and allow people to
be innovative. The second tip is to make sure that your senior leadership is championing
the effort and providing support. TSA, idea factey ri team is part of the front office.
Support really comes prom the highest levels here at TSA. And that they actively participate,
they will issue challenges, review the dash boards and keep up to date with trends. It's
important to mention it's not just senior leaders it's the mid level managers too. We
found talk to the managers in the field that they need Toan courage the use of idea factory
for the front line work force as well. It's important to understand your users, our users
are not in front of a compute ir, we design features on the site, communications with
that knowledge in minds. I think it's important to note we leveraged existing theet works
at TSA. Instead of creating own network reuse what had was out there to get our information
and messages across. Tip number four is focus out your social media mission. From time to
time we get ideas on the site that say, let us post pictures of ourselves and let us do
blogging and Wiki my idea and things like that. It's important to not try to be all
things to your users. Have an overarching agency social media strategy, whatever it
is you are doing fits in with the strategy. Ideal factory, sometimes people will postquestions,
or let's turn this in to I want to sell my old computer. That's a purpose of ideal factory.
We try to keep it true to the purpose we designed it for. We went from concept to lawn inch
six weeks. Basically it was driven from the top of the organization. We had integrated
project team that had focus from various offices that pushed the concept forward and we built
the web site in house with federal resources, it was really very very basic when we started.
We did teaser campaign, we launchd with a big ***. A live web cast and administrator
at the time sitting in front of a screen showing the site, interacting with the ideas. Indicating
his interest to hear from the employees. We also implemented ideas as quick as possible,
and we continued to implement them on a regular base toys show the work force we are serious
about the program. We actually added a category called improving ideal factory on the site
itself. So that people can suggest ways that we can enhance it and over the last couple
of years we actually added enhancements to the site based on suggestions from users.
I think it's important to recognize it doesn't have to be perfect. Think about whether you
are piloting to a user base or launch to everyone at once and we did the all at once big ***
approach because I think that was part of the message we want to hear from all of you
not just the folks on the west coast or these two states. Everyone's voice is important.
That was part of our message as well. In terms of the lessons learned, I want to go in to
a few best practices that we learned. We look at innovation in three phases, first there
is the idea generation phase, we move in to the evaluation and selection and finally transition
for implementation. We learned that we need to engage the employees throughout the entire
life cycle. Ask them challenge questions to get them to post specific ideas. When we are
evaluating the ideas we might reach out and get information about what they meant by the
idea or why do they think the idea would work or how can they help us gather additional
information. Implementation, we might have them come in and work with us to create a
plan or implement the idea. It feeds back and forth through some of the overall life
cycle. And then we have them write a article and promote that to the work force. Next one
is that we think it's important to cultivate the community. We keep the program fresh,
we have frequent communications regular updates, we listen to what they want and responds,
moderation in a way that creates a collaborative atmosphere on the site. We also celebrate
the successes we do have and the folks that are the champion tons site to keep them coming
back for more. We try to create environment where employees can help each other. I think
it's important to mention that moderation is really key here for keeping a productive
site, we trust our employees we want them to post directly to the site, yet we need
to still check those posts expo make sure they are appropriate. If someone abuses the
terms of use it is rare, it's very very rare, but if it happens it's usually just once.
They don't realize what the guidelines are, but we will email them back, highlight the
specific portion of the post does not meet the terms of use, a part they have not followed
to provide as much transparency as follow. After three abuses, they have you spended
and allowed to come back to the site, if they are not abiding by terms of use, they are
accessed to the site is removed. Almost three years we only have a couple of people this
has ever happened to. The next slide also talks about transparency. It's important to
say why you can't implement ideas or provide people as much information as possible as
about the life psych and will process. -- psych and will process. We like to give incite in
to the team, what we are, what we do, how we manage. Its not just a black hole the ideas
are going in to. I think it's important to be open to changing your pros S. if someone
has a good suggestion on the site we want to listen and evaluate it. I think it's important
to realize that not everyone is going to like everything. There are negative posts, you
are going to recognize and hopefully balance out with the positive posts and of the negative
posts you end up getting good ideas that could improve the organization. I think it's important
to establish thresholds and expectation for what is going to happen with the ideas. If
you say be patient we work with the program manager, management expert to get feed back
for ideas, that helps set the stage for what they can expect. The next slide talks about
balance. I think, a lot of times when you heard about crowd sourcing initiatives, people
say let the wisdom of the crowd tell you what is important. I believe that's true. I really
think it's a balance of the wisdom in a crowds with the subject matter expertise to really
highlight the ideas that are worth implementing. A lot of the ideas implemented weren't some
of the super popular ones, but still got a good reception from the employees and made
common sense from a business perspective as well. This is really important. They are not
going to know everything, neither with l your employee, it's important to balance that out.
Finally I think it's really important to remember that programs like these like ideal factory,
they are not just a web site. They are a program. It takes dedicated resources. It takes optimized
processes to help evaluate the ideas that are posted. It takes forethroughout and strategic
communication to let users know what is happening with the program and agency support. Not just
from senior leaders but throughout the agency to make something light that a success. Enhance
security, efficient operations, work like improvements and ultimately a higher moral
for employees. If you want to learn more, there is White House sponsored community of
practice for idea generation tools. The url is there if you would like to check it down
it's on the max Wiki site. You need to have a government email address to access that
site there is a lot of information, ideal factory in terms of what the other agencies
are doing. We have monthly meetings the second Tuesday of every month. There is also a great
white paper on that Wiki site that has a lot of information about programs like these and
what tools are utilized in the federal work space and also the obviously the apps .gov,
social media -- the ideas of TSA, we are in the process of sharing ideal factory with
the rest of the department for mobile homeland secure and hopefully we will be rolling out
to the rest of dhs shortly, I think it asks the question as to whether we are open to
sharing the code. We are definitely to open to sharing the code. I've been working with
lawyers to draft a template for a sharing agreement. At this point it is up at the department
level lawyers to take a look at. If you are interested, you can always send me an email,
we can follow up offline. At that point, I think that wraps up the slides. Ly turn it
back over to Rachel and Alecia for questions. >> Thank you, Tina. There are a lot of questions.
We will jump right in. One of the questions that I've got a few, is about how you built
the tool. Can you speak about Howe Barnes Hoefer & Arnett you built the tool what software
you used. Was there open source? Things like that.
>> It was -- it's .net, Microsoft sequel server. We built it in-house. I'm not a technology
person so I can't speak to specifics. It was a couple of our federal I.T. folks actually
built it. >> Okay. Great. Have you done usability testing
on the landing page and main idea screens. >> We did about a year ago, -- a lot of which
we incorporated in to the most recent redesign. We haven't done visibility testing since then.
A lot of the feedback we get is from our users. A lot of times they will suggest something
that says I wish we had a way of doing xyz and we think it's already there on the site,
they just can't find it. It gives us an idea of what people might be struggling with. We
can tweak things a little bit here and there as a result of the posts.
>> Great. Were pleas immediately willing to share ideas and comments or did you have to
overcome a culture of fearfulness of putting themselves out there.
>> I think they were willing to do it from the get go. Par of it was having our administrator
it is there on a live web cast in front of a screen watching the ideas come across and
interacting with them. He used to go on line and respond directly to ideas and interact
with people. I think people knew that TSA was taking it serious, senior leadership was
taking it serious and that really helped. There probably are people who are little bit
more reticent to participate. But for the most part we haven't seen that to be a problem.
>> Kind of going along with that, you mentioned that you do not allow anonymity on the tool.
Laura wants to know, if you can talk about the pros and Conns of the anonymity and identification
when it comes to engaging the public and not just employees.
>> That's interesting. From our perspective, we thought we kind of likened it to the you
are not willing to stand up from from of room in from of your peers and here is an idea
I have, kind of attach your name to it, then it shouldn't be an idea that can be worth
submitting. That was partly why we really felt strongly about having names attached.
If someone is having issue or whatever, there are confidential channels for them to go to
for those issues that they might be having. I know in our blog, we allow Anonymous posting
comments. I don't think that there is so much an issue with a allowing anonymity on public
sites. For it was important that the employees be recognized for the contributions and people
had the sense of we are all a organization and allowing them to network with each other
was key too. I don't know if it's as important for a public -- site.
>> Great. Can you speak a little bit about how you handle 508 compliance since you use
video on parts of the site. >> The video up there, we had it transcribed
below the video. We had it tested before we rolled it out. The site is 508 compliant.
>> I know you mentioned this. Can you talk about recognition people receive when their
idea is absorbed and whether that's linked to performance appraisals and things like
that? >> It's not. As far as what we do is we will
send out a broadcast email and shines their name in lights, make sure everyone knows what
they done, send the federal security director T certificate and a coin, and a letter, that
letter might make its way in to the personnel file that could potentially be useed by the
manager when evaluating but we don't have direct tie-in to the performance appraisal
process. >> Okay. Great. Here is an interesting question,
are there computers in breakrooms and certain areas that folks can use in the field during
their breaks? >> Yes. Yep. The breakrooms and a lot of the
airports especially the bigger ones have training rooms with computers where they can access
the TSA network including ideal factory. In some airports it's trickey because the breakrooms
might not be that close to the testimony terminal -- terminal where they are working. If you
have a 10 or 15 minute break you might not be able to get to the computer and back in
time. That's a one of our biggest hurdles is just trying to get make sure people have
access to the site. >> Are people able to access the site from
their personal computers. >> They are not, they have to be on a TSA
network. >> Great. Do you know which idead that most
rattings and how many ratings it got? It's an interesting question.
>> Actually, I think that is uniforms, I think we were surprised at how many ideas were submitted
about the uniforms and about a year, year and a half ago we rolled out new uniforms.
We went from the white shirt to the blue shirt. We had a lot of ideas about the we should
have blue shirts, I don't like this color blue. We were kind of merging the ideas together
since they were so similar. I think we had a large number of votes on that. We also had
some ideas recently about ties, they were not happy about wearing the ties with the
short sleeve shirts. That the way the color on the shirts were designed, the ties didn't
look right. So I think that idea had about 700 ratings with over 100 comments. They eventually
put out a policy that ties could not be worn with the short sleeved shirts. it wasn't optional
or a discussion of the management at the airport, it was no ties with short sleeve shirts. That
change was made as a result of the posts. >> Great. Can you talk a little bit more about
the staffing, is it a full time job for the four people. Is this their dedicated team
or do they have other job responsibilities. Are they full time employees or contractors,
add more to that. >> Sure. On the team, there are two contractors
and two feds, they are all full time dedicated the experts that help us from the program
offices it's a collateral duty for them. But for the people op the team, we are full time
dedicated to the program. As I mentioned we staffed up over time. -- took us a while to
get to this level. >> How many employees are there in TSA in
general so folks can get a sense of the ratio there.
>> 50,000 , roughly. >> Great. Do you have any evidence or a way
of measuring if the ideas have resulted in improved security or is it more of a employee
morale improvement. >> It's a mixture of both. Tbrs we look at
the ideas as to whether they improve customer service, improve security, improve like recruiting
and retention, improve morale or improve efficiency. Those are like the key things that we take
a look at to make sure that idea has to be doing one of those things. Other wise there
is no purpose in implementing it. We are going back to the ideas, especially the earlier
ones in getting more concrete data around the impact that the ideas have had. Some are
hard to measure but we are trying to pull the qualitative measures together for foes.
for-- those. It has to meet certain criteria before we implement it. We do go back and
make sure it did what we wanted it to do. >> Great it's hard to go back to like overall
satisfaction surveys and say, you know, people are happy at TSA, and directly or correlate
that to ideal factory. It's not that easy, I wish it was.
>> Here is a question that I this I asked you originally too, why did you decide not
the review the ideas before they got posted. >> That was a very deliberate decision that
was made when we were standing at the site. It was the whole aspect of trust and letting
the work force know that we want to hear what you have to say and hear society much that
you can post it directly to a site that the entire work force has access to. We are not
going to force it to googo through bureaucratic screening process where you have to wait a
week ever before it's posted. We found that to be one of the key features. You would think,
gosh, people could abuse that but they don't. So we really found it to work for us.
>> What strategies do you use to maintain employees interest over time in using the
tool? >> That's where we have periodic challenges.
We did one on the shift brief, before they start their shift in the fields they have
a standard shift brief. We said what about the shift brief would you improve in terms
of the types of information you get. We got ideas on that. I think bringing people in
to headquarters and having them talk abought bout what they do encourages people to participate.
Now we are rolling it out across dhs. People can suggest ideas that would impact not just
TSA but the whole department. It's something we work on to make sure that the site does
stay fresh and relevant. >> What would be your biggest concern in making
this a sustainable project? >> I think it's really taking it seriously,
dedicateed the people, having the leadership support. Really caring and wanting to do it
better and not just check out the box that yes, now we have an employee engagement tool
in our agency. Itle taking the idea seriously and working hard to implement them.
>> Could you talk a little bit about how much it cost to develop and maintain ideal factory?
>> As I mentioned we developed it in house. With a couple of feds, contractor doing enhancements
over time. So I think we've had one developer work on it periodically over the last couple
of years, I don't know the exact cost. But I don't think we is not a full time resource
by any means. Then its just the program team that managing it. We I guess sometimes pay
for travel for someone to come in and help us work on the program. We also we don't have
a lot of fees or five out monetary rewards at all to it's not -- I think the trickier
part is trying to find the budget for some of the ideas that are suggested. Because while
some of them save money, some cost us money. It's a matter of figuring out where the budget
for the ideas come from. That's working with the programs offices and the cfo to try to
carve out the funds for those ideas. >> Okay. When you first began, what was your
benchmark for success? >> I think it was like we hope people come
to the site. Post ideas and we can implement a couple out of it. It shifted overtime. We
have a strategic plan we do annually and track our process on a quarterly basis. It was interesting
to see the shift in our goals this year as we become institutionalized at TSA. I'm seeing
it happening in various meetings when like the recent Christmas day incident we got teams
of people saying what are employees saying on ideal factory about this. It's becoming
common for people to come to us and say we have a challenge we want to get out instead
of us sitting in a meeting and say why don't you do a challenge on that, people are coming
to us more. That's a measure of our success as well. We are really shifting our goals
to kind of become more institutionalized in the culture here.
>> Great. It is 12:00. But I just wanted to mention that will some people with further
technical questions, would you be able to provide an I.T. point of contact that I could
share with the attenDees? >> Could they email that is on the screen
and I could forward over to the point of contract. I want to make sure I don't give out the wrong
-- >> Okay.
>> I will make sure it gets to the right spot. Great. I wanted to give you a bit of feedback
that somebody shared. They really liked the two way aspect of ideal factory where themys
can pest an idea but also TSA is posting, theirs too to get feed back before they implement
an idea that they have, to not go down the wrong road.
>> Thanks for the feedback. We thought that was important enhancement to make. It was
actually suggested both by people here at headquarters who wanted to get the feedback
and folks in the field that wanted to give the feedback. We found that to work out well.
>> Great. At this time, I would like to invite Sheila or Rachel to say a few words if they
had any closing comments. >> I think Alecia, this is Rachel. I wanted
to thank Tina for the awesome presentation it was great and very helpful to people. You
done a marvelous job there and given people real life examples of things they can take
back and do at their own agency. Thanks Rachel for handling the logistics of everything.
Our next call is February 18th. Thank you all so much. That's it. See you next month.
>> Thank you, Tina. >> Thank you very much, appreciate it. Brack
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