Crowdsourcing for Shared Services offers scale benefits

One of the perks of my job is that I am lucky enough to speak with a lot of very clever people. As I was researching my blog on branding, last week, I called Jon Hanley, who’d written a piece on the subject a few years back, to get an update. I asked him about other significant shared services trends he was seeing, as Director of Project Delivery Services at BestBuy. Yes, he said, he was pretty sure crowdsourcing was going to be making a big splash in the future. As he explained the concept to me, I realized how hard it is to keep up with technology, let alone surf ahead of the wave (I live in Florida, after all). This is really operating at the absolute front end of innovation when it comes to shared services, and it’s probably best done by the businesses themselves. I've yet to hear of BPO providers investing in this. (If they are, they’re not sharing – but it may be another smart tool in their cost-minimization box.) Crowdsourcing is about taking a defined set of tasks or deliverables and publishing them to a large group of individuals for completion – typically facilitated by an online marketplace. The scale of these marketplaces can include millions of workers, which far exceeds the scale benefits of most shared service providers. Just like cloud computing, crowdsourcing also enables organizations to rapidly scale demand up or down. While initial efforts were fairly unsophisticated, the industry is rapidly developing advanced workflows and quality checks to produce higher value and more complex deliverables. Examples of crowdsourcing’s applications are varied but can include: call center operations, computer code testing, content creation, data management, creative content, and labor mobilization – and there are lots more. The fascinating thing about the crowdsourcing phenomenon is exploring where this industry will go in the next 1-5 years and the potential disruptive force it could pose to traditional shared services. The multiplier effect of a crowdsourcing strategy offers umimaginable opportunities. Some of the most innovative work is being done in Silicon valley. And some of the smartest operators are already collaborating with these folks. This discussion really touches on the future of shared services in that it may well be a core transformation agent for services delivery. What makes this even more exciting is combining the crowdsourced people with the cloud-based technology that is emerging – creating the ultimate disruptive storm. We are going to be bringing you a lot more content on this, so stay tuned. And in the meantime, if you had any experience with crowd sourcing implementations please contact me. I'd like to hear from you. [inlinead]

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