Since the early days of Silicon Valley, rogue engineers and software developers have engaged in "black-ops IT," a tradition of sneaking new technology into their companies to amuse themselves and thumb their noses at corporate protocol.
Now tech companies are increasingly trying to redirect black-ops information technology into officially approved channels to harness the creative energies of developers for new products.
Atlassian, a software-tools maker with offices in San Francisco, runs a quarterly programming contest giving employees 24 hours to produce an innovative feature that customers could use. The contest was inspired by Google Inc.'s policy of allowing its engineers to spend 20% of their time on projects they feel passionate about, says the Atlassian President.
So far, it has produced 47 significant product features, the company says. Winners are awarded with trophies and limited-edition T-shirts. Every contestant gets pizza and beer.
This year, after some of Atlassian's customers took notice of the event, the company decided it would send three "seasoned engineers" to help one of its customers run its own contest. Atlassian invited its customers to apply and subsequently picked Nintendo of America Inc. On Thursday, Atlassian will make good on its offer and send the three-person engineering team to Nintendo of America's headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Nintendo declined to comment.
Spiceworks Inc., an Austin, Texas, social network that helps IT professionals buy and manage technology, this year held its first annual "Spice Wars," a programming contest that gives developers a week to build and present a technical innovation. Winners were awarded $2,000 cash prizes in each of six categories named after Star Wars characters—Anakin, Chewbacca, C-3PO, R2D2 and two for Yoda.
Spice Wars is the one side chance to come up with breakout ideas that you wouldn't get in the normal course of business, and a chance to show the team that I'm willing to invest in them being creative.
Overall, Spiceworks's contest produced seven or eight usable innovations, including a way to run simultaneous tests to determine the best user experience, such as whether a button should be blue or green.
One of the contest's winners, a Spiceworks Technical Program Manager, says the event was a chance to think about your user and decide for yourself what's cool and build it rather than having a project manager telling you what to do.
A founder of Palo Alto investment firm Floodgate, learned about black-ops IT techniques from his father, a former Microsoft Corp. executive. He says it is important to keep developers engaged and feeling that innovation is valued.
When people take initiative, lots of management teams try to stamp that out. But the reality is, when people no longer want to take initiative, that's when a company is really in trouble, because there are not serendipitous breakthroughs.
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