Enterprise Crowdsourcing as a tool for building sustainable competitive advantage

Abstract

Enterprise Crowdsourcing (ECS) is a special form of crowdsourcing that looks at harnessing the social interactions of the employees within an organization boundary. ECS means outsourcing to the crowd inside the firewall of the enterprise and it is available only to employees and not open to the general public. This distinction is based primarily on the nature of rewards available in both communities. The traditional approach to incentives in public crowdsourcing marketplaces like Amazon Mechanical Turk, etc. is to offer some form of monetary reward in exchange for performing the tasks. By contrast, crowdsourcing within the enterprise has a pre-set maximum number of potential participants (the total number of employees). Typically, there are also constraints in terms of how much money can be used as incentives for the potential participants. In ECS, employees are encouraged to actively participate in a private crowd environment, where they offer their skills and expertise to other departments of the company. On the one side, rare expertise can be discovered and, on the other side, free capacities in one department can be used to tackle peak loads in other departments by outsourcing especially noncritical activities. Thus, enterprise crowdsourcing deems to be an elegant new paradigm to harness people s capabilities in a flexible and far more effective manner compared to rather static traditional cross-department collaborations. Service-orientation is the ideal means to realize such private crowds (i.e. not open to the public), because members can be dynamically discovered, are loosely coupled and thus composed at run-time, and flexibly assigned to activities. Wide spread adoption of Social Technologies are causing near-constant disruption, as defined as the Big Shift1, in the industry structure and for organizations, particularly knowledge industry like IT Services, to stay competitive it has to develop new capabilities by harnessing the knowledge residing with its employees. With traditional knowledge management system not providing the necessary impetus2 to tap into this latent knowledge resource, we believe adopting a social technology like Enterprise Crowdsourcing platform would enable organizations to successfully tap into this resource effectively. However for organization to get sustainable competitive advantage from this platform, it should ensure that Solutions for strategic business challenges are sourced from the employees and their contribution are duly acknowledged thereby creating an ecosystem where employees are self-motivated for active participation. Owners who source solutions through ECS should find real value in terms of relevance, applicability and impact of the solution sourced thereby encouraging more and more employees to use ECS as a platform for both sourcing and providing solutions. However we have seen that implementing the ECS platform is not a trivial pursuit as it requires design of framework to provide definition and governance support to outline activities, ability to reach to the experts, describe the right type of incentive systems for continued motivation to existing and newer participants. We believe that strategic challenges based on various studies of ECS platform like lack of strategic intent and objective from senior management can be a major impediment to ECS adoption. Another key issue we have seen is the inability of the organization to sustain the initial euphoria with respect to adopting the ECS platform.