I found this work surprisingly well and thought it might be interesting and eventually get the best you too...
By now all of you have
heard of crowd sourcing. If you haven’t here is the definition from
Miriam-Webster “the process of obtaining
needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large
group of people, especially an online community, rather than from employees or
suppliers.” There are numerous things accomplished through crowd sourcing
and numerous projects that use crowd sourcing as a way to find potential
solutions to an expressed problem.
Types of
Projects
In the age of the
internet and the collection of big data, where we collect 2.5 quintillion bytes of data
every day, there is no one organization that has the resources to
analyze the data appropriate to their company. So they enlist the “crowd” to
get the data looked at. One example is Zooniverse which launched the Moon Zoo crowd sourcing
project, allowing ordinary citizens to study and organize high-resolution lunar
images. As of the end of 2014, some four million lunar images had been studied.
On their website they have multiple projects in which someone could get
involved, such as annotating soldiers’ diaries from WWI, or transcribing museum
records. Anheuser-Busch crowd sources beer development, Egypt has crowd sourced
civic development and MIT has crowd sourced solutions to climate change.
Powerful
tool
Crowd sourcing can be a
very powerful tool to help organizations through tough problems. Wikipedia describes it as:
“By definition, crowd sourcing combines the efforts of numerous
self-selected volunteers or part-time workers, where each contributor adds a
contribution that may combine with those of others to achieve a greater result;
hence, crowd sourcing is distinguished from outsourcing in particular for a
number of reasons; including that the work may come from an undefined public,
rather than being commissioned from a specific, named group, and for the fact
that crowd sourcing includes a mix of bottom-up and top-down processes.
Regarding the most significant advantages of using crowd sourcing the
literature generally discussed costs, speed, quality, flexibility, scalability,
and diversity.”
Millennial may reach out
to others beyond the company walls to get solutions to problems
It can be a great way for small or single person departments to
get help in solving problems. Additionally many Millennial may reach out to
others beyond the company walls to get solutions to problems if they do not
have internal resources or get embarrassed to ask for help from office mates.
It can be a creative, cost effective way to get “different eyes” on your
challenges. However, there can be a downside to crowd sourcing for problem
solving.
The
downside- the need for secrecy
…the downside is that you may also be giving away company or
competitive secrets that can hinder the company in the marketplace.
Reaching out to others to get help on a problem or project can
be a great way to get a solution, however the downside is that you may also be
giving away company or competitive secrets that can hinder the company in the
marketplace. The challenge then becomes balancing the need for help with the
need for secrecy. Many workers, particularly younger ones may not understand
the marketplace to the extent that managers do. They may not understand that
sharing information in an attempt to get a solution may be doing more harm to
the company than the solutions may help. It is the task of management to
outline the parameters of using outsourcing to find solutions or to accomplish
projects. Make it clear to employees those things that cannot be shared outside
of the company walls. Provide the explanation of why confidentiality is
absolutely necessary.
If there is no downside
then management may want to encourage crowd sourcing for solutions. No employee
or set of employees has the answer to everything, but someone may say or
suggest something that will prompt the insight that leads to the solution. In the movie I Robot where
Detective Spooner is struggling with a problem and two inadvertent comments
from his Captain and from his Grandmother lead to him to solving the case he is
working on. Perhaps you too can enjoy the success that could come from crowd sourcing
your problem.
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(Guest Blog Article /Solution Based /Original Published
by Michael Haberman
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