Tech Executives Tap Employees for Ideas

By Sara Castellanos

Technology teams at large companies are moving beyond their traditional role in business support as their bosses encourage them to use their skills to develop marketable products and services.

The blurring of lines between IT and business groups reflects the fact that coding and the ability to analyze data are now central to product development. Tech teams at large corporations including credit-card giant Visa Inc. and logistics company United Parcel Service Inc. have developed new tools for employees and customers in the past few years.

Employees can get time, and sometimes money, to pursue projects that executives see as having strong market potential. Accounting firm Ernst & Young LLP this year gave a team of employees in Australia $100,000 to build a tool that uses automation to manage cybersecurity. It is currently being developed for client use.

"It's more important than ever for us to make sure the right ideas are bubbling up from people on the ground," said Jeff Wong, global chief innovation officer for Ernst & Young, which brands itself as EY.

Large organizations need to make an effort to adapt to change quickly, Mr. Wong said, where in the past, they could afford to wait to see how change affected the market.

At UPS, the rise of e-commerce and increasing global trade have spurred "unprecedented demand" for new ideas, said Juan Perez, the firm's chief information and engineering officer. Because employees understand customers, their ideas are helping UPS keep pace with competition and anticipate future needs, he said. "No matter what level you're in, we all have an obligation to keep thinking of ideas that make the business better," he added.

Mr. Perez encourages employees to come up with novel ideas and work with UPS's legal team to patent them. Six employees in Mr. Perez's IT group came up with a patented idea that was rolled out in 2017 called Preload Smart Scan.

The system uses Bluetooth-enabled electronic beacons in UPS delivery vehicles to notify workers if they have placed an item in the wrong vehicle, a problem that affects delivery timelines. The beacons send signals to scanners that read package labels, and the scanner notifies the employee if a package has been misloaded.

A patent developed by a UPS employee is owned by the company; Mr. Perez came up with 10 patents and has seven pending.

At Visa, all employees are allowed to spend 10% of their time pursuing new ideas that relate to the company's strategic objectives.

"Some of the most breakthrough innovations come from the front lines," said Rajat Taneja, the company's executive vice president of technology and operations, who helped spearhead the 10% program five years ago. Fostering a culture that enables significant innovation has never been more important, he added.

The company prides itself on letting employees test new ideas without a lot of bureaucracy, through hackathons and internal forums where employees can get real-time feedback.

Visa's employees have come up with 2,500 ideas to date, some of which have resulted in new capabilities for artificial intelligence, security and improving business processes, Mr. Taneja said.

One such idea resulted in a tool called Visa Transaction Controls, one of the most frequently used application-programming interfaces among Visa customers. APIs are pieces of software that enable apps, platforms and systems to connect with each other and share data.

The tool was developed by two employees in 2015. Visa customers, such as banks and small businesses, can integrate the tool into their apps to let cardholders set spending limits, receive transaction alerts and temporarily suspend accounts.

Homegrown innovation is particularly important for established companies, Mr. Taneja said. Being in a dominant position can lead to complacency. "If you aren't creating and incubating new ideas...someone else surely is," he said.

Peter Skyttegaard, senior research director at Gartner Inc., said innovation has been a popular topic of conversation among analysts and senior technology leaders in recent months. Older, more established enterprises are being forced to change more quickly because of increasing competition, he said: "Part of it is the fear of being disrupted."

Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 20, 2019 17:36 ET (21:36 GMT)

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