Amid all the doom and gloom of the financial situation, we're all facing a similar problem—how to keep our businesses afloat. With many organisations taking the standard knee-jerk reaction of battening down the financial hatches and looking to save money here, there and everywhere, we already see the threat of many businesses effectively saving their way out of business.

Quocirca does not, however, advocate any super-Keynesian means of spending your way through any downturn, but a position of a spending freeze is not a viable option, as has been shown in previous (relatively shallow) downturns. It is obvious that any IT budgets will have to be heavily targeted to ensure that the bang per buck is maximised.

One area where payback can be rapid is in attempting to streamline the way in which business problems are addressed. For the majority of organisations, this still seems to be somewhat ad hoc, with problem owners and people with possible solutions depending on high levels of serendipity to bring these two groups successfully together. Even those using specialised solutions tend to take a highly focused approach—and this often leads to only a few problem owners and a few solution providers getting together, often missing each other by the space of one meeting.

And the downturn will only make any real business problems far more acute. When there is a decent amount of money sloshing around, inefficiencies and lack of effective processes can remain hidden without any major hit on the company's bottom line. But, as soon as the revenues dry up to any extent, such inefficiencies suddenly jump out and can threaten to bring the whole ship down.

The search for an ultimate ideas management system has been long and painful, with a mix in the use of management dashboards, knowledge management systems, search engines and more manual systems such as TRIZ, Six Sigma, Zero Defects and so on. Such approaches tended to suffer from exclusivity, many being reserved for upper echelons of the business only, and others being restricted to specific groups with specific domain expertise.

At the other end of the scale, social networking is meant to be the ultimate in open problem solving, bringing in the wisdom of the crowd. Unfortunately, the uncontrolled usage of wikis and teamrooms has led to many of these approaches floundering after a short period of time. Again, as we look to ensuring that the business gets the returns on IT investment it expects, the wisdom of the crowd can be perceived to very rapidly become the pathetic baying of a pack - or even a narrow clique - of employees, customers or suppliers with little else to do.

What is really required is a cohesive, controlled means of building up a library of issues, and a corresponding library of solutions that can be mined as necessary. Provided that these libraries are opened in a secure and manageable manner to as many people as possible, and that templates are provided to ensure that the issues and solutions are worded in such a way that they can be seen to be "well-rounded", the costs associated in bringing possible solutions to match defined problems becomes minimal.

In this way, by using social networking concepts to bring in interested and adequately skilled resources as feeds in to a more controlled environment, the issues that organisations will continue to run up against can be more effectively prioritised and solved, ensuring that a company can remain flexible and responsive to the changing business needs.

However, as such an approach can help to focus on the direct financial and business benefits that can be accrued through solving even small issues, a by-product can be that savings can be made in such minor process areas as holiday booking, paper use, order processes and even what's on the staff canteen's menu; a proper ideas management system can do what an organisation is currently looking for—create savings to the bottom line. These savings can either be presented to shareholders and others in the financial community to demonstrate stability in the eye of the storm, or can be partially invested back into the business through further targeted IT or business process investments—as dictated through the ideas management system, of course.

A company that provides the underlying technologies and approached to manage this is UK-based Imaginatik. By bringing together the human and technical aspects through a single engine, an organisation's intellectual property can be more easily managed, ensuring that the right ideas can be matched up with the matching problems.

Quocirca has written a free report on the subject of ideas management, which can be downloaded here.