Ideas removed without warning

[Michael A. Lowry]

Evidently a large number of user-submitted ideas have been archived. This means that these ideas are no longer visible on community.broadcom.com/ideation and users can no longer vote on them. (E.g., the idea linked in the discussion thread Add 'Override' checkbox to variables in Task Properties to allow viewing/editing the Mod attribute)

Ideas submitted to Broadcom's ideation page represent a significant investment of time and energy by idea authors, and contain documentation useful to Broadcom customers, including documentation of existing product limitations, work-arounds for these limitations, and discussions of alternative solutions. In some cases, the archived ideas included the best available documentation of a problem or limitation with a Broadcom product, and no corresponding documentation page or Knowledge Base article was created to fill the gap.

Making matters words, Broadcom did not notify users that ideas would be archived and would become inaccessible. Idea authors were not given an opportunity to copy their ideas elsewhere, e.g., the community discussion forums. The way this was handled is sub-optimal and led to the current situation: missing documentation, broken links, and damaged trust.

@Jason McClellan, would you care to comment on this?

[Jason McClellan]

@Michael Lowry  -  Ongoing archival and data clean-up activities are common best practices within any large data repository. As Broadcom and our Communities continue to grow and evolve, the Community Managers have established and instituted these best practices with the goals to maintain a healthy data repository, ensure optimal performance, and maintain a reliable customer experience.   Thx ~jm​​​​​

------------------------------
Thank you
Jason
Broadcom Community Platform Admin, IT
------------------------------

[Michael A. Lowry]

@Jason McClellan Thanks for the reply.

I note that you explained the reasons for archiving some ideas:

1. Maintaining a healthy data repository
2. Ensuring optimal performance
3. Maintaining a reliable customer experience

I'm surprised that a company with the resources of Broadcom was unable to adapt to growth without throwing overboard valuable user-created data.

You also have not addressed the way in which this was handled: without notice either in advance or after the fact. If Broadcom believes it is a best practice to invite user contributions and then delete them without warning, I'm not sure what to say.

[Keld Mollnitz]

Well said, @Michael A. Lowry,
for what its' worth, I'm 110% behind you on this.​

/Keld.

[Owen Williams]

As president of the CADRE user community I would like to add my full support to @Michael A. Lowry on this. I agree with him 100%.
Once again, I believe @Jason McClellan and Broadcom have go this very wrong.
The "CA" platform was perfectly able to cope with the large number of ideas, and had much better features for linking them to the communities.
In my opinion it is the Broadcom platform that needs to be "enhanced" (or replaced) to cope with (at least) the volume/functionality that we had before.

------------------------------
Technical Consultant
Redcentric PLC
President of the CADRE community/user group
------------------------------

[Michael A. Lowry]

The Ideas program FAQ does not mention anything about archival of ideas. If Broadcom intends to continue with the practice of archiving ideas, the company should probably at least mention this in the FAQ.

The FAQ is also outdated. It lists @Scott.Willson as community management lead for enterprise software, but according to his LinkedIn profile, Scott left Broadcom a couple of months ago.

[Michael A. Lowry]

I opened a support case about this, and requested a list and exports of my archived ideas. The support specialist said this was not something to which they had access.

@Jason McClellan: would you kindly provide this information?

[Jason McClellan]

@Michael A. Lowry  -yes I have been in contact with the support ticket owner regarding your ideas.   I converted the .SQL file today to review.  The Automic Workload Automation Community Team was fully engaged to archive older migrated ideas based on their archive rules.  @Kaj Wierda.    I'll unpack to see what ideas of yours were pulled in.  ~jm​​

------------------------------
Thank you
Jason
Broadcom Community Platform Admin, IT
------------------------------

[Michael A. Lowry]

Any news? If possible I'd like an Excel or CSV file listing my ideas, as well as exports of any that were archived.

[Jason McClellan]

@Michael A. Lowry -  still waiting for the file from the vendor.  I dropped a note this morning.  ~jm​

------------------------------
Thank you
Jason
Broadcom Community Platform Admin, IT
------------------------------

[Michael A. Lowry]

FYI: tens of my ideas are missing.

[Michael A. Lowry]

Today I received from Broadcom a list of all my ideas, before the cull.

Of the 114 ideas I submitted, Broadcom removed 89. As a proportion of all of the ideas I have submitted, Broadcom removed 78%.

The vast majority of the deleted ideas were neither clearly accepted nor rejected, but in the status Submitted or Ready for Voting. Broadcom thus removed most of the ideas without ever providing feedback and without publicly indicating whether the ideas would be likely to be delivered.

The original stated purpose of the ideas platform was to involve customers more in product planning, and to do so in a way that was more transparent. Broadcom appears to have largely abandoned this goal. (Or perhaps more charitably, Broadcom has lost faith in the ability of the Higher Logic platform to support the goal.)

Thanks to @Kaj Wierda for providing the list of ideas. ​​Thanks to this we will now at least be able to reconstruct our own internal list of submitted enhancement requests.

[Michael A. Lowry]

Today I saw that Community Manager @Antony Beeston posted a note to the What's New section that appears when viewing the main page of the Automic Automation community.

Dear Customer,

The Automic team at Broadcom values your input on improving Automatic Automation to deliver you the best possible value.

Over time we have collected over 2,000 ideas and enhancement requests through several channels, including the ideation system on Broadcom communities.

The volume and age of these requests are too large to prioritize and build them into the product meaningfully. This volume also inhibits us from setting the right level of expectation as to when we will progress ideas.

We want to do better. After careful consideration, we have decided to clean up the Automic Automation ideation backlog using the criteria of age and number of votes.

Unfortunately, this means many ideas have been archived; the majority were posted before 2020 and attracted less than 20 votes.

Reducing the number of active ideas allows us to be more responsive and transparent on the progress and possible delivery into future releases.

Kind regards,

The Automic PM Team

​This announcement is not dated. Replying is not possible because it does not appear in the list of discussion threads.

[Michael A. Lowry]

Back in 2018, Sam Creek posted a list of all of the ideas migrated from the old Automic Community to the CA Communities. 

[Jason McClellan]

@Michael A. Lowry  -  are you looking for the archived list?   We do not delete anything from Community its archived to speed up the index.  I believe when we migrated the old JIVE CA site years ago, the older ideas were archived and only the last 24 months were moved to the new platform. @antony beeston can answer.

------------------------------
Thank you
Jason
Broadcom Community Platform Admin, IT
------------------------------

[Michael A. Lowry]

We have a partial list of our deleted ideas.

If you would be so kind as to post the complete list in Excel format, that would be helpful - not only to us, but to others whose ideas were removed.

[Michael A. Lowry]

On 15 November 2024, product management disabled submission of new Automic Workload Automation ideas on the public Broadcom Ideas Platform.

For details, see the official announcement.