By Kristen Vennum
Kristen Vennum is a vice president with The North Highland Company's Washington, D.C. office. In 2009, she was recognized by Consulting as one of the Women Leaders in Consulting when she was the recipient of a Future Leader Award.
I had the opportunity to attend the first annual conference on the Future of Distributed Work in San Francisco in October. The conference brought together researchers, academics, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to explore the emerging industry of crowdsourcing. (For more on the conference: http://crowdconf.com/)
My focus was to understand what consultants should know about crowdsourcing and its strategic uses. This Consultants on Consulting article explores my takeaways from the conference, including how crowdsourcing could intersect with and influence the more mature industry of management and technology consulting.
What exactly is crowdsourcing? Well, crowdsourcing is a how, not a what. Crowdsourcing is a marketplace for individuals and organizations to source work and a global workplace for talent (who may choose to work for free, or for monetary or non-monetary compensation). Jeff Howe, while writing for Wired magazine, coined the term "crowdsourcing" in a June 2006 article titled: "The Rise of Crowdsourcing."
If you have updated a Wikipedia entry, posted a review on Yelp, or asked a question on an online forum, you are part of the "crowd." If you have sourced work through Amazon Mechanical Turk, 99 Designs or other platforms, you are a crowdsourcing employer. Using crowds to solve problems is nothing new. However, advancements in global technology infrastructure, improvements in the user experience of crowdsourcing platforms, shifts in work preferences brought on by new generations and numerous other factors are converging to create an industry where everyone has access to work, and employers can source internationally for the best talent, at the best price, with the shortest turnaround time. Welcome to Factory 2.0.
How Consultants Can Use Crowdsourcing
How can consultants use crowdsourcing to supplement our own work? First, imagine a future in which your client's baseline expectation is that you leverage crowdsourcing in order to focus your billable hours on the most valuable tasks. In that scenario, consultants use crowdsourcing to supplement our workforce for non-strategic, low-value but high-necessity tasks. Some examples include formatting documents, data entry, data cleansing or moderation of social/community forums.
Consultants can use crowdsourcing for more strategic work, such as specialized research, graphic design, Web design, testing and translation. Imagine having 2,000 people perform testing simultaneously, with results overnight, anywhere in the world. Or, imagine needing to brand an organizational change management effort, and getting more than 100 logo possibilities overnight.
The North Highland Company leveraged crowdsourcing to create a "culture book," which was turned around by Elance, a for hire, online freelance workforce of 300,000, in two days, for a very low cost and is also experimenting with crowdsourcing for other graphic design projects and non-confidential document formatting. All of this is possible with crowdsourcing.
Consultants also may use the crowdsourcing workplace to find and complete projects, either independently, or on the side. Additionally, many consulting firms already have established internal forums for collaboration. Consulting firms can utilize crowdsourcing to expand access to internal talent, and break down geographic barriers.
Advising our Clients on Crowdsourcing
Start-ups have been quick to leverage the virtual workforce to flex costs and access a diverse talent pool, while very large organizations have been slower to adopt despite the significant benefits. Organizations can leverage crowdsourcing to tap opinions (customers' or employees') for innovation, product design, direct access to market research or "evergreen" customer feedback instead of once-a-year surveys. Clients can use crowdsourcing to accomplish tasks –moderating content of social forums or breaking down work given to traditional outsourcers and moving it to the crowd, where an entity is not as dependent on the social and political regimes of a specific geography. Crowdsourcing affords organizations faster turnaround time and the ability to manage spikes in volume.
There are some interesting developments in the non-profit crowdsourcing movement, including Samasource, an organization who believes that crowdsourcing could solve global poverty. CEO Leila Chirayath Janah states, "The biggest natural resource on the planet is the brainpower of the people on the bottom of our economic pyramid." Additionally, a disaster response crowdsourcing group—Crisis Commons, mobilizes the crowd through putting on "CrisisCamps" and looks to leverage volunteer technology communities to support ongoing disaster response efforts around the globe.
Saad Kahn of CMEA Capital posed some thought-provoking question consultants should ask clients: "What could you do if you had access to 10,000 people right now to help you do anything you want? How would you leverage that
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