Two’s Company, Three is “Crowd”; Is the Global Sourcing Industry Ready for It?
As I was glancing through various news and analyses of the sourcing world, I came across this article on “Crowdsourcing”. The term felt extremely intriguing and as I started reading about it more, I stumbled upon some really interesting facts.
Our very own Google uses crowdsourcing to generate maps for Google Earth. IBM, last year, organized an innovation jam to tap the collective minds of their own crowd (employees, their families and even their customers) to generate innovative ideas and by the end of their first session. They had collected 37,000 ideas. And the ideas were put to vote in the second and last session.
Crowdsourcing is an open platform which invites people from across the globe (which generally comprises amateurs, hobbyists, freelancers or part-timers), either to develop a new technology or carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data. YouTube, Wikipedia, Second Life are all examples of crowdsourcing where anybody can contribute data.
Companies see it as an advantage as the expenses involved are much lower than the expenses when traditional sourcing models are followed. So, many organizations are now adapting this model of sourcing.
But is the global sourcing market really ready for it where communication barrier still remains a major challenge in the sourcing world, and is a reason for many offshoring deals’ failure?
Yes. The practice of ‘crowdsourcing’ has been working well for more than a decade now in some specific areas. It’s only a matter of giving the practice a new name. Other ways to call it are – open platform development or collaborative sourcing or cooperative sourcing. The Linux system was built under this model, Nokia used it develop interesting mobile applications, lots of games are being developed this way. This model becomes useful when the task at hand requires massive effort, some amount of creativity, the result has an appeal to a wide audience, and the platform resources ( like sourcecodes, APIs, etc) are freely available.