You don't want to be late for the future

BANGALORE, INDIA: The underlying principle of Crowdsourcing is that more heads are better than one. It is the practice of obtaining the needed services, ideas or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially from an online community. This word was coined by Jeff Howe in 2006 illustrating the emerging trend of the outsourcing of several activities by companies to an indeterminate large group of people on the Internet, mostly encompassing a global population, and coming from different backgrounds and education.

The main aim of crowdsourcing (collective intelligence) is to get ideas from a large number of people in the community. For example, crowdsourcing is today, used in the field of biosciences to identify new patterns of mRNA and to maintain a library of it for future scientific reference or a designer launching new designs for a new market uses votes or comments from other designers to evaluate the success of their design lines/ fashion labels. The above examples are not results of any defined team, but that of collective intelligence, using crowdsourcing platforms.

The most genuine advantage of bringing in mass intelligence to solve problems therefore, is the variety of solutions offered and the affordability.

TYPES OF CROWD SOURCING

According to Jeff Howe the four primary types of crowdsourcing are as follows;

Crowd Wisdom: The crowd wisdom principle is to harness many people's knowledge which helps to solve problems or to predict the future outcomes or to help in business strategy. A study also confirms that greatly intelligence group of people are consistently outperformed by crowds.

Crowd Creation: This is the best part of crowd sourcing, "Creation" activities like asking them to do TV commercials, language translation, or solving scientific problems. Examples include iStockPhoto - which contribute high quality photography images of amateur photographer and Linux - an Open Source Software (OSS) developed by community of dedicated programmers.

Crowd Voting: Crowd voting paves way to communities' judgment to organize, filter content such as newspaper, music and movies. Internet offers various methods to perform voting ratings of articles by users or accessing popular algorithm via links and views. Reality TV shows and Google are the best example for crowd voting.

Crowd Funding: Crowd-funding finds a way around the usual corporate concern which offers financing to groups or individuals, which might deny the recognition or opportunity. Crowd funding is usually done by artists, charities, start-up companies to raise money for their work like documentary or raising fund for social cause etc.

ENTERPRISE CROWDSOURCING

Enterprise crowdsourcing (ECS) is a new innovative work model that is changing the way work gets done in an organization, which is otherwise impossible to achieve, in a pure play outsourcing model. ECS is the next phase of innovation in outsourcing to a larger spread of people - i.e. collective intelligence within an enterprise - which helps boost productivity and reduce costs - all through a flexible, cloud-based model.

Using crowd sourcing in an enterprise is a smart move as it helps break big tasks into byte-sized tasks, which can be easily distributed to a crowd, with high quality outputs, at low costs. The best suited ECS models are: Data management, crowd translation, testing, custom crowd and search relevance.

Crowdsourcing helps communities to innovate creatively while streamlining their processes. Focusing on operational excellence, enables companies to successfully produce more innovative products, within the constraints of the community making a leader in the IT business. At EMC, we believe in developing thought leaders and innovators. Crowdsourcing will help us identify experts inside the organization and prepare them to become the next thought leaders.

(The author is Director, EMC IT Cloud Operations)