Better communication from ESRI about idea statuses

[Bud]

Could ESRI consider improving communication about the statuses of ideas that we submit? It seems like ArcGIS ideas stay in the "Open" status for a really long time (many years). We often don't hear back from ESRI. 

Whereas other companies like IBM seem to do it better:

IBM Ideas Portal (https://ibm-ai-apps.ideas.ibm.com/)

(We get updates within a couple of weeks about what IBM plans to do with the idea.)

"Receive notification on the decision: In either case, the team will let you know as soon as possible.

The status of a request depends on where the request is in our development lifecycle. To determine the status of a request, use the following definitions:

1. Submitted: The request submitter will automatically be notified by email when the request has been submitted. IBM has not yet evaluated this request and plans to provide an update within 30 days of submission.
2. Under review: The IBM team is evaluating this request. A decision or request for more information will be provided within 90 days.
3. Needs more information: The request submitter will automatically be notified by email when the request requires additional information. IBM is requesting more information from the submitter before the evaluation of the request can be completed. This request will remain open in this status for 30 days, but if the submitter doesn't respond and the necessary information is not provided, the request may be closed as "Not under consideration."
4. Future consideration: This request may be a candidate for a future generally available (GA) release if the necessary resources to implement the request are available. Teams are encouraged to review these requests at least annually to evaluate whether a yes or no decision can be reached. 
5. Planned for future release: This request is a candidate for a future generally available (GA) release.  IBM's statements regarding its plans, directions, and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice at IBM's sole discretion.  IBM will update this request to reflect any changes.
6. Delivered: This request has been delivered into a previously released version of the product, or imminently in the next available release.
7. Not under consideration: IBM has evaluated the request, and has determined that it can not be implemented at this time or does not align with the current multi-year strategy.
8. Functionality already exists: The functionality or capability as requested is already available within the product. 
9. Is a defect: IBM has identified this as a defect requiring a code change to resolve. Please contact the appropriate customer support team to report this problem. The request has been closed."

[rsun_TQB]

This is a fantastic recommendation!

[VMitch]

Great recommendation!!

[RyanUthoff]

Wow, could we extend this to Esri bugs too? I have multiple bugs waiting to be looked at and resolved for 2+ years now. A 90 day turnaround time would be nice!

[BillFox]

Yes please,

ditto:

I'm hoping Esri will include a comprehensive "Enhancement Priority & Status" web page so we can get some sense of almost there or not gonna happen.

The "Under Consideration", "In Product Plan" labels could be enhanced with something like this:

"Enhancement request <XYZ> is currently number 123 in our Under Consideration queue."

And,

"Enhancement request <XYZ> is currently number 123 in our Product Plan queue and is targeted to be included as listed on our Product Life-Cycle / Road Ahead web pages."

Maybe ArcGIS Enterprise is in a similar cycle as ArcMap => ArcGIS Pro with this level of enhancement being pushed to ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes.

Any additional status updates would help us plan accordingly.

[KoryKramer]

Thank you for submitting this idea @Bud .  We wanted to first make sure that you and other community members are aware of the idea status descriptions provided here: https://community.esri.com/t5/community-help-documents/arcgis-ideas-submission-guidelines-and-status... 

Sharing the IBM Ideas Portal statuses is helpful to give us a concrete example of how another company has chosen to manage their ideas. When we were moving ArcGIS Ideas from the former community platform to the current platform, my colleague @ThomasEdghill and I reviewed a number of other ideation sites and specifically studied the various statuses that other companies use.  We also considered our own business processes and worked with representatives from many of our product development teams to determine the statuses that you see today.

We studied the example you provided and it appears that it potentially requires many touches to move through various statuses before getting to Future consideration, which is where a majority of their ideas are found (with some of those ideas from 2014). It also appears that there is a total of 13 ideas Delivered to their customers.  

To provide an overview of communication on ArcGIS Ideas, here are the numbers from this morning.  These represent requests across 62 idea exchanges*.

*Note that a large number of closed ideas (Already Offered, Implemented, Duplicate, Not In Current Product Plan), along with ideas that had no activity for 5 years, were archived in November 2020 with the move to the new Esri Community platform. So while many of our Open ideas could be from years ago, most of the activity across the other statuses represent activity since November 2020.

It’s easy to see that the largest number of ideas are in the Open status. In a system where there are thousands of ideas posted, it isn’t possible (or even desirable from a software UX standpoint) to incorporate every request. An idea with the Open status is one that is building momentum among the community, and development teams use votes and additional feedback as one of many considerations to determine whether and when they may take an action.

In that sense, Open ideas are not being ignored, they are just not currently in a team’s backlog or product plan, so there isn’t anything to communicate at this time. We also try our best to ensure that other statuses such as Already Offered or Needs Clarification are used as much as possible when we need to communicate those messages on ideas.

Communicating how our product teams are responding to your ideas is important to us and we know that we are not perfect.  For the products with higher volumes of ideas, we provide release blogs that highlight your ideas included at each release.  See https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-ideas-blog/bg-p/arcgis-ideas-blog.  Other teams communicate through status updates as outlined above.  That said, we know that we can do better and are working on ways to continue improving the monitoring, managing and decision making related to ArcGIS Ideas. In the coming year, our goal is to improve communication and help enable product teams to better close the loop with the community on how product plans relate to ideas.

We hope that sharing this background and overview helps.    

[Bud]

Merged from a separate thread, "Is submitting enterprise ideas a waste of time?"

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Of all the enterprise ideas that have been submitted in the last year, I only see one that is under consideration. And of all the enterprise ideas I've submitted, Esri hasn't acknowledged any of them.

That makes me wonder, is submitting enterprise ideas a waste of time? From a paying-customer perspective, it seems like our enterprise ideas are not being taken seriously by Esri.

I imagine, in reality, that's not the case. I'm a big fan of the ArcGIS platform and Esri staff in general. So I wonder if Esri's efforts to meet our needs are not being done justice. And as a result, customers might be getting unintentionally frustrated.

I posted about this previously: Better communication from ESRI about idea statuses. The reason I'm posting similar thoughts here is: I've noticed that the communication about enterprise ideas is especially sparse, when compared with ideas in other communities. It was suggested that "In the coming year, our goal is to improve communication and help enable product teams to better close the loop with the community on how product plans relate to ideas." But I haven't seen much evidence of that in this particular community so far.

[MichaelVolz]

Besides submitting an idea, I would join the Early Adopter Program as you have more direct access to development than just submitting an idea.

[EricEagle]

Thinking out loud here.  Most Enterprise customers are likely significant: major industry players, civil government, and defense/military units.  Many probably have a negotiated SLA with Esri and a dedicated account representative or team (probably former participants in that industry).  That sort of level of business can (understandably) give the customer special access to submit feature requests and get priority support on bugs.  Sometimes, esp depending on how the SLA is set up, it can grease the wheels to get dev/engineer time and have human-to-human conversations.

My guess is that in your case, the Idea page (which takes into account community support) may not be the greatest path because while your submissions are awesome they are very esoteric.  I'd further guess that out of the thousands of people browsing the Ideas page, maybe 10 fully grasp what you're proposing and out of that 10 maybe 2 are in the right place at the right time to give it an upvote.

So I'd either:

amplify your idea posts on some other network, build momentum among your community of practice, and get them over here to upvote your stuff, because even if Esri says that community support is "only one" variable of many, it's still a variable; and eventually when you cross some threshold they have to address it; or,

Be the squeaky wheel with your account rep.  They work for Esri, but they kind of work for you too.  Their job is to keep you happy.  Sit on desks.  Physically, sometimes.  Get them to get you technical meetings with the right people and be your advocate.  This is what I have done in the past and it usually results in a better, faster and more tailored solution than hoping an idea takes off here.

[DanPatterson]

Welcome to the Esri Community  apply to the early adopter for sure.  

You have the ear of the various dev. teams for a finite period of time.  ArcGIS Pro 3 Beta 1 is currently on and the participants run the gamut of user types and organizations.