The Idea Behind The Idea

Everybody has ideas at work. It may be a process idea. If may be an organizational idea.  For me, it tends to be a product idea.

It's been my experience that pushing ideas toward product takes persistence. It's not easy. For me it's been a process of influencing at a local level (within my group) and slowly expanding the sphere of buy-in until the idea reaches the attention of a decision maker.

At EMC in 2007 the culture of idea incubation and growth fundamentally changed. It got easier (but not necessarily easy!). This new culture of innovation will be highlighted at EMC World 2008 in Las Vegas. I'll be describing the idea that I helped propose at last year's Innovation Conference. EMC put together an "idea channel" that allows employees to put an idea into an innovation pipeline.

What happens before ideas go into the pipeline?

I like to call that the idea behind the idea.

I wrote a post about an EMC innovation technique I call acquisition rumination: product architects consider the impacts and possibilities that arise by positioning the capabilities of a newly acquired company against their area of expertise. The idea I have been working on started in this exact way. 

What acquired technology got my innovation wheels spinning?

Grid technology.

What area was I working on?

Centera.

Grid Is Location Independent

The thing that intrigued me the most about grid was the fact that compute jobs can be assigned anywhere it a networked grid of nodes.  So the technology is "location independent".  Well, so is Centera. When customers send and retrieve content to or from a Centera, they don't specify location. The actual data can live anywhere in a networked "grid" of nodes.

The commonality of location independence between products was enough for me to search out somebody and begin the brainstorming process. So I arranged a conversation with somebody familiar with grid technology (Dan).

My conversation with Dan went something like this:

Centera is location independent. Grid is location independent. Tell me how Grid works, and I'll tell you how Centera works, and we'll see what happens.

So Dan and I dove into the details of our respective products. He explained the inner workings of grid to me. As we suspected there was a lot of overlap between the two. We made a list of how Centera technology could be applied to a grid environment.

And then I began to explain the inner workings of Centera technology. I explained content addresses, the XAM API, metadata, immutability, retention, and hands off-management. That's when Dan raised a customer issue he was familiar with, and an idea began to form.

Data Provenance

Over the course of many customer visits Dan had heard stories of customers struggling to capture the history and generation of a given piece of information.  If a given document was generated as part of a multi-party transaction, what (and where) were the original inputs?  What algorithm transformed these inputs?  Can I navigate back to the originals?  Can I re-run the algorithms? 

This problem is often referred to as "Data Provenance". It's not a new problem in any way.  In fact, a large body of university research has already been generated on the topic.  Check out some of the  research done to date on "Provenance-Aware Storage Systems".

The conversation Dan and I were having seemed new.  None of the research we looked at was going in this new, innovative direction.  We both thought the idea was really "cool". 

So Did EMC

Ultimately we liked the idea so much that we wrote a 150-word abstract of the idea in the summer of 2007, and we submitted the idea into the Innovation Contest pipeline.

Fast forward to May of 2008.  A proof of concept has been discussed, architected, designed, and coded. It's running; I've seen it with my own eyes.  We'll show it at EMC World in a couple of weeks.

This is what I mean when I say that EMC has made it "easier". There's now an "innovation infrastructure" to implement cool ideas. One of the key pieces of this innovation infrastructure is a team of very smart (and very fast) developers in China that can rapidly prototype and build. Are there enough ideas in the pipeline to keep these guys busy?

What's Happening At EMC World?

The best way I can describe the new Innovative Showcase at EMC World is as follows: a dedicated show floor area in which conference attendees can learn about EMC's Innovation ecosystem.

During the showcase some of the proposed technologies and processes will be shown in a very cool way. There will be presenters. Some will bring demos. The innovation sub-culture at EMC will be highlighted.

But it's not just the customers that will be learning. EMC will be learning as well.  These ideas may eventually end up in the environments of the customers we talk to. I'd like to find out from customers if (a) the idea is valuable, and (b) how best to deploy it.

This all highlights the key point about EMC's Innovation Ecosystem:

Customers are a key part of the process.

See you at EMC World,

Steve

Comments

[David]

Steve, I'm really looking forward to checking this out at EMCWorld this year, if I can sneak away from my own obligations for a couple hours!

The "idea behind the idea" really depends on people being willing and eager to explore outside their own comfort zone, and being encouraged to do so by the culture around them.

It also helps to have a good set of people you can talk to who have wide areas of expertise. That's one of the quiet benefits of a healthy internal online community -- zero barriers to meeting that right person.