Stormshield employees can benefit from dedicated working time in which they can work on a subject of their choice, separately from the standard projects included in their job description. This ring-fenced time is known as ITO (Innovation Time Off), and is intended for purposes such as improving the company’s products, creating new tools for improved working methods, developing new ideas, or even indirectly contributing to Open Source projects. The only limit? Their imagination.

Each in-house staff member is given 14 days per year to work on these innovation areas. Although solo work is possible, the intra-and inter-team collaborative aspect is encouraged… and far more valuable all round.

Employees with ideas share them on the company’s internal social network, enabling them to launch the project, inform their colleagues… and maybe even enlist their contributions. Note that there are as few filters as possible, in order to avoid stifling good ideas at an early stage.

This innovation time is managed by three Technical Leaders from the Stormshield Technical Community, whose mission is to bring innovation to the company. The team is available to support employees with their projects and assist them where a material need exists, or even to incorporate certain ideas into the product roadmap where appropriate.

And indeed, several innovation projects run by Stormshielders have already emerged. Let’s look at some of the biggest successes:

• HiveSwarming tool

This tool is used in-house to simplify development work (storing text files in GIT, instead of binary files), and is made available to the community on GitHub.

• Scrumwise accessibility project for a team member

Stormshield uses various project management solutions on a daily basis, including the Scrumwise online tool. This agile tool had not been adapted for use by one of our employees who has a visual impairment. “I used ITO time to solve this problem, creating specific software to enable our colleague to access Scrumwise data via audio,” explains developer Aurélien Bertron. The library for this application, created in NodeJS, was made available as Open Source on GitHub so that it could potentially be used for other purposes by other contributors.

• Our shared “WeReview” annual appraisals tool

The initiative came from Thomas Montaigne and Cyrille Lahaille, two engineers who are usually in charge of developing our product offering and who offered their help to develop an online platform under the ITO scheme. Their desire was to break silos between departments and help the HR Department by building a digital tool for annual appraisals. With an ergonomic internal tool that is easy to access, sustainable and above all secure, managers and employees are now equipped to take advantage of this special opportunity for discussion.

 

• The use of row-hammer

A Stormshield team applied a virtual machine attack technique which was presented at the Infiltrate conference in 2018. This initiative prompted an investigation into how best to secure virtual environments. Visit our technical blog if you want to find out more!

• Translation management via Sigma

This tool, developed by our technical writers in conjunction with developers, is used by the Documentation department to manage uniform translations of our software applications in all languages.

And you… when you join Stormshield, what will your innovation project be?