Crowdsourcing, a modern business term coined in 2005, is defined by Merriam-Webster as the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers; The word is a combination of the words 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'. The idea is to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers.
In a February 1, 2008 article, Daren C. Brabham, "the first [person] to publish scholarly research using the word crowdsourcing" and writer of the 2013 book, Crowdsourcing, defined it as an "online, distributed problem-solving and production model."
This mode of sourcing is often used to divide tedious work between participants. A famous Example: Wikipedia. Instead of Wikipedia creating an encyclopedia on their own, hiring writers and editors, they gave a crowd the ability to create the information on their own and by continuous online means. The result? The most comprehensive encyclopedia this world has ever seen.
Let us find out how the ‘Crowd’ helps in the ‘Outsourcing’ industry.
To do this, outsourcers may set up a managed crowd sourcing model with the help of service providers, who may define the way the process must work through a well-defined workflow or template. Crowd sourcing has the potential to dramatically alter the way outsourcing is done today, as it allows outsourcers to tap individual talent located in disparate corners of the world.
Now let’s see who has spoken about ‘crowdsourcing’ with real well defined examples
One of the pioneers in the topic of Crowdsourcing are the founders of www.crowdsourcing.org. In their article LEARNING FROM THE PIONEERS OF OFFSHORE OUTSOURCING they have spoken about “Three innovations driven by Indian Outsourcing Service Providers”.
Extract:- “The success of Indian Outsourcing Service Providers paved the way for crowdsourcing to introduce a step-change in the adoption of globalization in the enterprise market segment. By (1) proving the concept of a global workforce, (2) prompting enterprises in multiple industries to disaggregate their business processes, and (3) developing a winning engagement model for offshore outsourcing, Indian Outsourcing Service Providers opened the enterprise market for Globalization 2.0 in the form of crowdsourcing.”
Now let’s see who gets the crowd to one common place for the industry to make full use of them.
When it comes to IT outsourcing and especially application development and maintenance (ADM) successful crowdsourcing needs to align the work of many contributors in a structured way for a proper result being the sum of many pieces. This is differing from crowdsourcing in areas like innovation or testing of applications where the result of on member of the crowd might be sufficient to achieve the overall goal (being the wanted result). As a result successful crowdsourcing of ADM needs to ensure the pieces of individual work are properly orchestrated and the sum of all pieces fits together to form the wanted end result. This task is very similar to manage a distributed team of developers in a global delivery model (offshore, nearshore) as is the core focus of pliXos. A central SaaS platform to effectively manage globally spread teams, combining communication tools such as chat, wiki, document management but also specific ADM tools such as requirements management or SW quality monitoring etc.
Picture 1: Generic concept of a centralized SaaS tool for efficient governance in a global delivery model, example ADM
Proper governance requires functionalities monitoring the status of deliverables, the overall project progress, costs etc. All this combined in a SaaS suite of products and available via a browser interface is a “sophisticated business application for the Social Media Generation”. It not only ensures efficiency in distributed teams, but also helps including the best possible talents in a team, which otherwise might not be willing to support. At the same time, travel costs are significantly reduced.
Due to the common challenges in ADM by a global delivery model or by building on a crowd, the same set of functionalities can be used for a project success. The pliXos Outsourcing Director was developed for customers sourcing Application Development and Maintenance (ADM) to efficiently manage their Service Providers (SPs). Due to the similarities between in ADM sourcing, Service providers may be replaced by members of the crowd. The Outsourcing Director still allows managing the whole set up to achieve the wanted results.
Picture 2: Existing Cloud based tools for an efficient management of SW services delivery by building on a global set of services providers (SPs) are a perfect basis for the management of a development team involving the crowd (crowdsourcing in ADM). The Sps can partly or full be replaced by members of the crowd
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