Enterprise 2.0: Can firms use crowdsourcing within the organization?

Today, let me present the last post of the Crowdsourcing series. I will try to answer the question: why and how companies can use crowdsourcing?

First, let's try to understand what are the shortcomings of older technologies? In general, we distinguish channels (e.g. email and person to person messenger) and platforms (e.g intranet and corporate site).

Channels present a low degree of community and cannot be accessed by others. Platforms, on the other hand, allow only a small group to generate or approve the content; visit to platforms leave no traces and only a small percentage of people’s output winds up on a common platform.

McAfee (2006) described a case of German investment bank Dresdner Klein- wort Wasserstein (DrKW) using 3 communication tools:

• Blogs
• Wikis
• Messaging software

The investment bank's blogs include interactions, the outputs, and the people involved. Anyone in the company can read them. Any episode of knowledge work is widely and permanently visible to all. McAfee (2006) later suggested that these technologies can facilitate knowledge work in ways that were not possible before by creating a collaborative platform that reflects the way work really gets done.

Before introducing blogs and wikis knowledge workers felt that current technologies are not doing a good job of capturing knowledge. While all knowledge workers surveyed used e-mail, 26% felt it was overused in their organizations, 21% felt overwhelmed by it and 15% felt that it actually diminished their productivity.

Components of Enterprise 2.0 technologies

Search

For any information platform to be valuable, its users must be able to find what they are looking for. However, it is not always the case. In the Forrester survey, less than half of respondents reported that it was easy for them to find what they were looking for on their intranets.

Links: between pages, reflect the opinion of people

Google made a huge leap forward in Internet search quality by taking advantage of the information contained in links between Web pages. Links are an excellent guide to what’s important and provide structure to online content. In this structure, the “best” pages are the ones that are most frequently linked to.

Authoring: creates content

Internet blogs and Wikipedia have shown that many people have a desire to author — to write for a broad audience. Blogs let people author individually, and wikis enable group authorship. When authoring tools are deployed and used within a company, the intranet platform shifts from being the creation of a few to being the constantly updated, interlinked work of many.

Tags: better categorization of content

The Forrester survey revealed that after better searching mechanisms, what experienced users wanted most from their companies’ intranets was better categorization of content. Some sites on the Web aggregate large amounts of content, then outsource the work of categorization to their users by letting them attach tags — simple, one-word descriptions.

Extensions: “if you like this, you will probably like also..”

Moderately “smart” computers take tagging one step further by automating some of the work of categorization and pattern matching. They use algorithms to say to users, “If you liked that, then by extension you’ll like this.” Amazon’s recommendations were an early example of the use of extensions on the Web.

Signals: when new content of interest appears (e.g. RSS).

Even with powerful tools to search and categorize platform content, a user can easily feel overwhelmed. New content is added so often that it can become a full-time job just to check for updates on all sites of interest.

Corporate social networking

…is the use of technology to help employees identify:

• Who knows what
• Who is interested in what
• Who wants to contribute to what...

in the interest of improving the business of the firm.

There are plethora of tools that employees and companies can use for that. E.g.

• Profile based sites (e.g. Google+, Facebook)
• Discussion forums
• Tools that analyze emails, instant messaging and virtual spaces to identify social networks
• Tagging tools
• Mashup tools (combine info from different sources)
• Quick connection tools such as Twitter, instant messaging
• Co-generation tools such as wikis
• Expertise location and sharing tools

Firms may use these tool to achieve different goals, e.g. connecting people, training and new hire orientation. However, there are couple of principles that companies need to be aware of:

• People engage in things they find interesting. Tools help determine what people are interested in and connect people with similar interests.
• Co-generation of ideas is done by people “serving themselves”. This is promoted by making it easy to add and share info.
• Under-explored relationships will surface when people, data and applications are circulated and tagged.

Source: McAfee, Andrew P. "Enterprise 2.0: The dawn of emergent collaboration."Management of Technology and Innovation 47.3 (2006).