Crowdsourcing / Crowd Sourcing is a concept initially evolved in the advertising world to pool in successful creative ideas from a large group of people or community ( the crowd ) and reward the best ones. This fast evolving concept has been well described in the book written by James Surowiecki “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations”, published in 2004 which talks about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.
The Philosophy
The crowd sourcing philosophy revolves round the following process:
1. Company has a Problem
2. Company broadcasts the problem online
3. Online Crowd is asked to give the solutions
4. Crowd submits the solutions
5. Crowd vets the solutions
6. Company rewards the winning solvers
7. Company owns the winning solutions
8. Company profits
Crowdsourcing in IT Projects:
In the fast changing world of Information Technology (IT) the success and competitive advantage of an enterprise largely depend on how fast and effectively these evolutions can be implemented internally. The major concern for any Enterprise is the cost involved in upgrading the existing technology. This is where the most cost effective and efficient sourcing models are important to make sure that the ROIs are at the best and beneficial to the CIOs.
Crowd sourcing is the type of outsourcing in IT projects were the ‘wisdom of crowds’ are utilized in undertaking the projects using most efficient sourcing spaces in internet.
How to do crowd sourcing?
When an enterprise decides on undertaking the projects through a crowd sourcing space the following important issues has to be considered:
1. Is the project viable for crowd sourcing?
2. Is the crowd sourcing platform / space good enough for executing the project of this nature?
3. What is the real ROI in using the crowd sourcing?
4. Is the project cost and timeline well defined?
5. How critical is the projects?
Type of projects that could be best suited for crowd sourcing
· Modular or small projects
· Only Source code rewrite
· Projects that could be easily manageable
· Easily integratable
· Well defined requirements
· Well defined cost and timelines
Crowdsourcing could' not find much takers from India Software companies predominantly because of the perception that it benefit the vendor company and not the service provider. Companies in IT hubs like Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad etc should venture more into the crowdsourcing space to leverage its advantages as mentioned below.
Advantages for the Sourcing company:
Following are the advantages for the company that goes for a crowd sourcing:
· Cost saving
· The advantage of choice
· Flexible contracts
· Controlling the budget
· Execution of projects on time
Advantages for the Vendor Company / ISV:
How can a software development company / ISV make use of crowd sourcing?
The general perception about the projects that are the candidates for crowd sourcing are that the projects are meant for the freelance consultants and programmers. This could not be the real case considering more and more big companies (including the Fortune 500) prefer to publish their IT projects in the crowd sourcing space. Following are some of the best ways a software provider company makes maximum use of the crowd sourcing concept:
· The best avenue to acquire a new customer showing the real skills in project execution
· Could be used for training its employees in an effective way
· Venture into newer technologies
· Keep the bench resources engaged
· Work on some good concepts where the IP belongs to the developer
Individual Programmers
Individual programmers can be the real beneficiaries on the crowd sourcing space. They would benefit by:
· Freedom to choose the projects
· Earn an extra income
· Get trained in technologies
Some of the successful crowdsourced IT projects can be found in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crowdsourcing_projects
Some Crowdsourcing spaces:
· Top Coder www.topcoder.com
