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06.15.10 San Francisco Uses Crowdsourcing To Reduce Budget Spending  By Bill IvesHere is more on how the City of San Francisco in its quest to save money, increase revenues and spur innovation turned to its 26,000 employees for solutions. In a matter of weeks, nearly 600 ideas were submitted and more than 4,000 votes cast via its ImproveSF.org program. This program was created with a SF-based company Brightidea Inc. that I have covered before here (see Brightidea Innovation Management). From two of the winning ideas the city will save more than $90,000. These and two other revenue-producing ideas will be implemented. Some of the other ideas include: Among the ideas - simple, direct, and right on-point: save money by eliminating unnecessary on-hold music; cut back on washing of SF-government cars; use 311 to boost revenue through over-the-phone credit card purchase of ID cards, parking cards and ticket payments, muni visitor passports, maps and merchandise - even marriage licenses!: and auction off city-owned (and unwanted) furniture, vehicles, computers etc. This is a great government example of innovation. My state of Massachusetts supplied another recently. It started with the White House move to put public data available. So Massachusetts wanted to be one of the first states to have an open data site. Then they ran open competitions for who could develop the best iPhone apps to creatively use the open data such as bus schedules. I really like these creative ways to support innovation in a budget constrained environment by crowd sourcing it. Comments About the Author: Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog. |
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