Good ideas stick, great ideas stay. Putting a Post-it® note on the fridge or taping down an IV may seem far from revolutionary. But when it comes to the products we find ourselves reaching for day to day, one company has turned the art of staying into a science: 3M.

Responsible for inventing and manufacturing more than 60,000 products, 3M has been helping millions of customers get more done in the office and at home for over a century. The company’s research and development labs and 250-plus plants create some of the most innovative solutions today, from now-standard desk supplies to cutting-edge materials science.

To help engineers and scientists get solutions to customers faster, 3M’s Corporate Research Systems Lab (CRSL) is chartered with developing new digital technologies. “Our goal is to develop new epic technologies, and tools that the rest of our organization can use in their products commercially, as well as internally such as in manufacturing, sales, and IT,” explained Chief Architect and Lab Manager Hung Brown Ton.

Historically knowledge silos made sharing a challenge: code was scattered across different repositories, in shared drives, and in Bitbucket and Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). Now, most of the organization leverages GitHub to speed up research and development time and share best practices at scale. “GitHub brings us together globally,” Brown Ton said. “It was the natural one to choose.”

3M is home to world-class teams. Yet before moving to GitHub, it was more difficult to share and exchange code, algorithms and models with each other which sometimes caused duplication of work. Today, “collaboration and visibility mean you can solve a problem once,” said Kevin Truckenmiller, Lead DevOps Engineer in CRSL. “With GitHub, we’re starting to see that collaboration break down those silos a little bit.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say that changing the way 3M works could change the world. Within these silos are researchers at the top of their field from material science, data science to digital solutions; sometimes, the solution is as close as the team down the hall. “If you can share tools amongst the organization from a particular repository, I truly believe it will enable the human race versus just enabling a specific division to do one thing,” commented Kevin Truckenmiller.

Transformation started small: initially, the team met with the Data Science Lab to recommend putting their AI algorithms together into a shared GitHub repository. Over time, 30 GitHub users grew to over 1,600. “It was more of a trickle,” Truckenmiller said, “then it turned into a torrent of folks using GitHub services.”

Although the team never officially mandated GitHub as their organization’s tool, DevOps and other engineers outside the lab quickly jumped on board, using GitHub to deploy on their multi-cloud ecosystem. “Now, that we’ve got the cloud version of GitHub, it’s more of a native sync operation,” Truckenmiller explained. “We’re trying to provide an abstraction layer that can perform downstream operations from source control and integrate seamlessly to all of our different ecosystems.”

As 3M moves to GitHub’s cloud-hosted option and begins to add automation features like GitHub Actions on top of their CI/CD pipelines, they expect to see deployments rise even further. “Since starting with GitHub, we’ve gone from 400 deployments in 60 days to 6,000. Soon, we’ll see a lot of people controlling all or at least some of their CI there.”

While GitHub’s ease of use paved the way, its organic adoption proved what the CRSL team had been counting on: connection. “Many source control products do what they’re supposed to do,” said Truckenmiller. “You can interact on the command line, but the thing that we really like about GitHub is that it gives us a better ability to harness the social aspects of coding.” Researchers and experts in their field can contribute and share ideas on common ground—or common repositories—without being software engineers by trade. “We have other domains of expertise—mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, folks building Internet of Things (IoT) devices and working on embedded software. We’re using GitHub across all of these fields.”

Since starting with GitHub, we’ve gone from 400 deployments in 60 days to 6,000.

Today, several of 3M’s commercial digital projects can be tied back to GitHub. For example: the FiltreteTM Smart Filter detects changes in air pressure, uses this data within a proprietary 3M algorithm to calculate filter life, and notifies a user, through an app on the user’s mobile device, when a filter should be replaced. Connected Safety, currently in field trials, depends on product sets hosted on GitHub. Work on 3M Cloud platforms are directly connected to GitHub. “GitHub is the starting point,” said Brown Ton. “We are building these platforms to accelerate our research and development, thereby accelerating our product development to our stakeholders and customers.”

Faster product development also equals faster production. Before using GitHub, 3M’s manufacturing organization deployed new IoT type devices onto older manufacturing lines. Code was stored on either a desktop or a hard drive. After uploading the IoTs’ code to GitHub, data scientists and manufacturing teams collaborated on an algorithm that could predict process failures on the manufacturing line before they happened. “We could alert our folks on the line and let them know, ‘Hey, we’re seeing some anomalous behavior as the line’s running,’’ said Aaron Burstein, Data Systems Technical Manager. “When one of the data analysts was pulling data from the line and couldn’t access a query, they were able to make the fix within the shared GitHub repository themselves. “They can self-service and make their own change, versus needing to call somebody else up and report the issue. It’s made projects go a lot faster.”

Innersource may happen behind the company firewall, but scalability is always at the forefront. “3M’s core values are not necessarily just company-centric,” said Truckenmiller. “We really do have the rest of the world in mind. We want to protect IP, but at the same time, we don’t want to solve the same problem five ways.” By shifting to a more open innersource model, a single solution can be shared amongst several researchers—with impacts that ripple all the way to consumers. “We’re moving towards more openness, which ultimately creates a communication culture and a generative culture, rather than one that’s bureaucratic and process-based.”

The goal of innersource? “You do it once, provide for many.” Countless 3M divisions use Docker containers and develop in AWS. Since they all require access to AWS, that also means managing thousands of AWS credentials. Before GitHub, individual divisions would create their own credential tooling, resulting in multiple tools for the same purpose. Instead, CRSL created one federation tool to help teams access their AWS accounts using credentials from their corporate directory. Teams can easily open a pull request to download the tool’s code from a GitHub repository and put it to use. “Velocity is key. Instead of someone asking if we can build a feature for them, they can open a pull request and add it themselves.”

The data engineering team rotates between Python and Java, so CRSL also innersources packages. Packages and utility functions are published as referenceable objects using GitHub Packages, making it possible for teams to keep reusing common utilities across all of their different projects and repositories. “GitHub Packages works really well inside of Actions,” Truckenmiller said, “because the code is right there and the packages are right there.”

From code reuse to package management, 3M’s high-paced digital transformation journey stays secure at every step. Changing one piece of code can lead to vulnerabilities, but GitHub’s fine-grained access management and policy enforcement give Truckenmiller peace of mind: “Having source control security is the end and the beginning. GitHub makes sure that the team has end-to-end control over the security of their code and their systems.” For example, teams can open pull requests in other division’s repositories, but can’t merge their changes to the main branch without review and approval. They also rely on GitHub’s Dependabot alerts. When code is sent to build, it’s automatically scanned for vulnerabilities—ensuring compromised code never makes it to production.

But finding and fixing vulnerabilities doesn’t end with 3M’s code. Several internal teams actively contribute to open source projects, which includes resolving security vulnerabilities in external code. In one instance, “There was a Microsoft repository where we found a security vulnerability,” Burstein explained. “We ended up opening a pull request and pushing the fix back into their repository for them.”

Just like before, solve a problem for your team, solve a problem for many. The lab views open source the same way as innersource; more minds are better—and faster—than one. “CRSL likes to be where technology will be in two to five years. We try to project that, and we try to have a philosophy that projects that,” said Truckenmiller. “We are leading the charge, so to speak, at 3M by open sourcing as many things as we can.”

The effort is ongoing, with teams contributing on behalf of the company and individually: “Open source is more of a living, breathing thing. It needs to have that stewardship of a singular company, but it also needs to be backed by the rest of the community so that it can be expanded on.” Working again with Microsoft, CRSL rewrote their IoT platform on the Azure side as open source with one of Microsoft’s commercial business units. “If we solve a problem, we don’t want to have to do it again and we don’t want anyone else to have to either.”

“People can see that we are actually accelerating our research with the toolchain that we’re introducing to the company,” Brown Ton said. And as divisions use GitHub to collaborate across the company or contribute to open source code across the world, they quickly recognize that “GitHub is the beginning of that toolchain”—regardless of their department or role. “GitHub is an engineer’s best friend”, said Eric Walker, Software Research Engineer.

From chemists, to data scientists, 3M’s teams understand the power of putting a hypothesis to the test. GitHub has gone from an experiment to the new standard—with proven results time and again. “GitHub is not only bringing people together, it is accelerating our research and development and simplifying the way we do work globally,” Brown Ton said. “People are really using GitHub to collaborate in a way that they never were able to do before.”