Delivery Center Network (DCN) for Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) employees responded overwhelmingly to an internal communications campaign to create a motto that best characterizes the attributes of their organization: “Fueling excellence. Igniting growth.”

The Brainstorm 2010 campaign invited DCN for BPO employees to submit a three- to five-word phrase that they feel truly characterizes who the organization is as a high-performance business. From there, the “ideation” process took root, as people continued to collectively brainstorm new ideas to create the perfect tagline to anchor DCN for BPO global communications in fiscal 2010. Ideas were submitted via the Accenture Collaborative Innovation Solution, also known as the Innovation Grapevine

The Brainstorm 2010 campaign far exceeded expectations in terms of participation among employees. Within four hours of the program’s kick-off on July 1, 80 taglines were submitted. By the end of the month-long campaign, Brainstorm 2010 netted 3,300 tagline ideas from among DCN for BPO 22,000 employees.

“It was exciting to be part of Brainstorm 2010 and be involved in developing a tagline,” says Bangalore’s Muds Iyer, Level E-DCN for BPO, who coined the winning tagline. “I am proud to have contributed the winning idea. The prize of an Apple iPod touch was a fabulous incentive as well!”

Pankaj Vaish, managing director-DCN for BPO, expressed his pride in the high level of innovation and engagement that DCN for BPO employees demonstrated through Brainstorm 2010.

“When I read through the tagline submissions I felt truly inspired,” Vaish said. “These ideas reflect the collective personality of our DCN for BPO organization. The creativity, passion and business knowledge our employees demonstrated during Brainstorm 2010 is a powerful indicator that we understand our mission to deliver high performance.”

Flood of ideas

Kelly Wink, DCN for BPO communications lead, said that the grapevine offered room for commentary about why someone submitted their idea and how they felt about it, which helped establish a true measure of communications effectiveness and shed light on their Accenture experience.

“One way we have been able to keep employees engaged through communications is by keeping laser-focused on innovation,” Wink explained. “Brainstorm 2010 is the latest example of this.”

In further innovative enhancements to employee engagement, the organization re-engineered its communications engine—the DCN for BPO Portal—to incorporate Real Simple Syndication (RSS) and ticker-tape technologies for automated, daily news updates, and piloted “DCN BPO Mobile” to give employees access to global news headlines while on the go.

“The prize of the Apple iPod touch best displays our mobile solution,” says Wink.

Wink noted that DCN for BPO also launched an Employee Giving Campaign that enabled employees to shape the future of the business and make a charitable donation.

New best practice

The success of Brainstorm 2010 established a new best practice for internal organizational communications. Mike Bechtel, senior manager-Accenture Technology Labs, commended Wink and her communications team for realizing early on that effective communications and clear incentives were key to generating employee engagement.

“DCN for BPO’s use of the Innovation Grapevine is a tremendous example of getting Enterprise Social Networking right,” Bechtel said. “Mass collaboration asks for a little contribution from a lot of people. In this case, the wisdom of our particular crowd proved to be exceptional.”