Enterprise Crowdsourcing: Bringing the benefits of working with crowds to Organizations

Crowdsourcing at its core is a very simple and elegant concept; You tell your problem to the world and choose from a wide range of people who offer to solve it for you. This is an excellent idea theoretically, but the bare bones implementation has certain challenges, especially for large and medium scale enterprises. Each of these challenges has a clear solution to resolve it:

1. Transactional relationships: A freelance/crowdsourced relationship is by definition transactional. As each problem will require a different skill set and possibly a new vendor, each relationship will be transactional. Thus trust cannot depend on previous individual interactions, but on other factors.
2. Vendor Management: Large organisations depend on procurement teams to manage vendor payments etc after the activity is done. When we crowdsource each vendor needs to go through a lengthy and challenging process to get payments processed, which adds to cost and inconvenience to all parties
3. Difficult for the Risk Averse: Due to the roles they perform in companies, lot of people shy away from the perceived higher risk of a crowdsourced solution. This could be due to the perception that the rewards of better/ cheaper solutions are reaped by the company while the risk is assumed by the person sanctioning it.
4. Selection Fatigue: For every activity that they must crowdsource, the decision makers will need to wade through a sea of selection. The very benefit of crowdsourcing; access to a large pool gets drowned in the noise of possible options.

This led to the development of Curated Crowdsourcing or Crowdsourcing 2.0. In this the crowdsourcing facilitator would collect the delivery partners, optionally evaluate them (basically see that they passed a certain level of competency) and then offer their services up for customers to utilize. This helps to reduce the perceive risk of the customer, reduce selection fatigue and even Vendor payments by offering one point payment (to the marketplace). On the other hand, it does nothing to alleviate the problem of transactional relationships with the partners as the marketplaces do not take responsibility for execution.

This sets the stage for the next step in the evolution of crowdsourcing. We call it Managed Crowdsourcing or Crowdsourcing 3.0

The basic tenets are something like this:

• Identify pool of professionals with skills needed.
• Evaluate the skill holders for level of proficiency and more importantly their commitment to t the task
• Manage the entire transaction and move it towards a relationship, by providing a single point of contact (Project Management).

Crowdsouricng 3.0 lies in the sweet spot between outsourcing to a company and hiring a freelancer. Done correctly, webelieve it has has the potential to change how we work, especially in managing our careers