Case Studies: Using Crowdsourcing and Mobile to Give the Supply Chain a Voice

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Global companies are using mobile technology to gather feedback from supply chain workers in order to improve working conditions.
Mobile technology is opening up exciting new opportunities for organisations to gather feedback and opinions from internal crowds, particularly employees who work in factories, warehouses and retail units.

Previously this section of the workforce has been regarded as difficult to communicate with digitally. This is mainly because they do not have easy access to a computer terminal during the working day. Also many do not have digital identities such as a corporate email address which are usually required to roll out digital communication platforms.

In practice many organisations have deprioritised efforts to open a meaningful dialogue or deliver digital services to this section of the workforce, and attempts have either been muted or ineffectual.

Using employee’s own mobile phones as the primary channel for digital communication removes many of the logistical barriers and presents an exciting opportunity to leverage the ideas and insights of factory and retail workers.

Soliciting opinions from the supply chain

Some organisations are even going one step further, and actively canvassing the opinions of workers in their supply chain, particularly in manufacturing units in developing countries.

In recent years large corporates have come under scrutiny from consumers, pressure groups and even shareholders over poor working conditions and low levels of pay in factories in developing countries.

But giving workers in these facilities a voice provides a potentially revolutionary opportunity to achieve better working conditions, ensure standards continue to be adhered to and satisfy consumers with ethical concerns.
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APIs are enabling an unprecedented flow of innovation

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On Tuesday I had the great pleasure and honor of doing the opening keynote at the APIDays Sydney conference, the first API (Application Programming Interface) conference in Australia, excellently organized by Saul Caganoff of SixTree.

APIDays was founded by Mehdi Medjaoui in Paris in 2013, has since been run in Barcelona, Berlin, San Francisco and now Sydney, with the event in Paris last year attracting 800 delegates.

Below are the slides for my keynote on The Flow of Innovation. As always, note that my slides are designed to support my presentation and not to stand alone, but still may be of interest to people who did not attend my keynote.

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Creating the future of professional services – Sydney 11 March

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The subtitle of my first book, 15 years ago now, was ‘The future of professional services’. I still believe it’s an incredibly important topic, not just in the future of business, but also in the future of work and society.

As such I am delighted to be collaborating with one of the world’s leaders in professional services strategy, George Beaton, in organising the Clients and Firms of the Future: How to Compete conference in Sydney on 11 March.
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Why 2015 Will be Another Year of Growth for Elance-oDesk and Freelancer

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Service marketplaces like Elance-oDesk and Freelancer are well placed to experience growth in 2015.

In recent years major service marketplaces such as Freelancer and Elance-oDesk have experienced exponential growth across key metrics such as the total value and volume of jobs completed and the number of registered providers.  The success of these platforms has helped facilitate the rise of  a global distributed workforce which can be hired on an on-demand, freelance basis.

There is every indication that the rapid growth of the major service marketplaces will continue during 2015. Both the two market leaders had a successful 2014 and are well-placed to capitalise on the opportunities in the sector.

Freelancer continues buying its competitors

In late 2013 Sydney-based Freelancer floated on the Australian stock exchange. The IPO has given the company a foundation to continue its ambitious acquisition program, gobbling up minor competitors, players with a significant footprint in individual countries or marketplaces which focus on a particular niche.
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The future of work: better decisions supported by computers and professionals

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This morning I gave the opening keynote on The Future of Work at the Chartered Accountants Thought Leadership Forum on Future Proofing the Profession: Preparing Business Leaders and Finance Professionals for 2025, the third year in a row I’ve given keynotes on different topics at the Thought Leadership Forum.

In my keynote I went into depth on the forces shaping the future of work and the action that we can take today to help create a better future. One of the topics I raised was about the future of decision-making in a world of increasing automation.

Andrew McAfee of MIT has created a simple illustration of the path to better decisions.

Hippo_mcafee_decision_510w
Source: Andrew McAfee
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Insights into what sustainability really means

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Futurist Ross Dawson recently spoke about Building Financial Sustainability at the Vicwater Financial Sustainability Conference.

Ross opened his speech by telling us what we have long suspected. The word “sustainability” has been so overused, misused and abused that it has substantially lost its meaning. He wants us to reclaim this lost meaning of sustainability and to remind us that questions about what is “sustainable” REALLY mean, “Can we keep doing this indefinitely into the future without everything falling apart?”

Ross reminds us that even the very concept of “indefinite sustainability” is very difficult because we don’t live in a steady state world. Reality is constantly shifting under our feet and this sort of dynamism is going to keep us constantly on our toes, so for a system or an organization or even a way of being to be sustainable, it’s going to have to change constantly with an ever-changing reality.

It’s more realistic and practical to talk about paths to sustainability, that sustainability isn’t a destination so much as a road.

The contexts in which we’re going to have to look for paths to sustainability include:

  • Business and Finance: where the dominant emerging trend is that between high-performing organizations – which can seize change and can continue increasingly add value – contrast with low-performing organizations that resist change and subsequently create less value or increasingly destroy value over time.

  • Climate and the Environment: in which, spite of divergent opinions, a consensus is forming that mean global temperatures are rising and that human activity is a major contributing cause. How will we manage sustainability in a world of rising sea levels and interruptions on the water cycle and their impacts on human habitation? What should be done? What can we do?

  • The Social Sphere: In a world of increasing population and urbanization, how will we manage an ever-increasing influx into urban fringes with their inevitable disruption to communities? How will we find work and meaningful contribution for all these people? If the increase of urban riots is a symptom of underlying frustration, inter-cultural tension, divergence and fragmentation how will we manage that? How will we maintain our communities? Some societies seem to be better at coping with change than others. What can we learn from them?

Whatever answers we come up with, we have to face the fact that we’re living in a world of increasing friction between people and the environment and competing needs. Our challenge is about how clever and creative we can be of managing to keep everything together without things falling apart. The higher the Humpty-Dumpty of our civilization sits, the further he can fall.

All these frictions and instabilities will inevitability influence financial and economic sustainability. If we fail to design sustainable solutions in a context of escalating and accelerating change, change will be thrust upon us anyway, and we might not like what we get.

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Launch of keynote speaker influence ranking tracker

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We have just launched a keynote speaker influence ranking page, giving an indication of the social and online reach of people who work primarily as keynote speakers. The widget is embedded below (and you can embed it in your own website if you want), though it is better viewed on the main rankings page.

There are and have been many influence ranking systems around. This one focuses on a particular group – keynote speakers – for whom online influence is particularly important, and brings together three measures: Klout, website traffic, and Twitter followers.

It is of course very easy to criticise any influence rankings mechanism, and we do not pretend this is by any means ‘accurate’, it is intended to be indicative and interesting. We have provided complete transparency by publishing the algorithm we use. The intention is to tweak and develop the algorithm over time. Let us know if you have suggestions on how to improve it!
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Will Local Service Marketplaces Soar Despite the Challenges?

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Local service marketplaces have flourished in recent years, but the evolution of some of the key players show there are significant challenges.

One of the most fascinating developments we have observed in the Crowdsourcing Landscape over the past two years is the explosion in local service marketplaces. These sites allow individuals to outsource small personal tasks and errands to local providers. From house cleaning to fetching the groceries to somebody coming to assemble your flat pack furniture, it’s now easy for buyers to connect to sellers who will do those jobs they don’t have time to do or those chores they hate.

The best known local service marketplace is TaskRabbit which has received nearly $38m in funding and expanded outside the US. Meanwhile other platforms have flourished usually serving particular cities or countries, for example Ask for Task in Canada and Airtasker in Australia. The latter is now looking to break into the US and providing a service targeted to businesses.

Despite what look like some real success stories, local service marketplaces have real challenges, as evidenced by the evolution of the business models of some of the major players.

A fragmented market

One of the main issues is that the sector is highly fragmented, both in terms of geography covered and type of service offered.  It can be difficult for a local service marketplace to expand beyond the metropolitan area it usually serves and few sites genuinely compete at even a country-level.  New entrants may also find considerable competition for particular cities or around particular services.
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The rise of crowdsourcing in Malaysia

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I was recently in Kuala Lumpur to do twin keynotes at the National Crowdsourcing Conference organized by Digital Malaysia, and meet with government officials to discuss how Malaysia can best tap the potential of crowdsourcing.

The Star of Malaysia, the largest English-language newspaper in the country, interviewed me while I was there for a feature section on crowdsourcing. Here are excerpts from some of the articles:

The main article Captivate the crowd looks at the big picture of crowdsourcing and its potential:

Collaborating with others through crowdsourcing can put previously unachievable goals within reach.
…
In fact, as an individual, you too can stand to benefit from the use of crowdsourcing ­platforms. No matter what your ambitions may be, they could very likely become a ­reality if you can successfully capture the interest of the crowd.

“You can start to look for further work opportunities where you can get paid for things you’re good at,” says Ross Dawson, chairman of ­network ­economy experts, Advanced Human Technologies.

“You could also see if there are ways to contribute to something out there. Try it and see what works.”

Alternatively, you could even look for ­others to help you accomplish a dream project such as creating a short film or ­performing a charitable deed.

Although unpaid contributions tend to get better crowd responses, a paid crowdsourced project can still do as well if the ­crowdsourcing platform used has been well designed.

“It’s about how you design it to get people to want to contribute. People should enjoy the process, then it’d be easier to get them involved,” says Dawson.

“There should be a sense of community, and people’s schedules should be respected. You should give as much flexibility as ­possible because that’s valuable to people.”

Crowdsourcing: Opening up to possibilities gives an overview of crowdsourcing in Malaysia.

Crowdsourcing brings about a whole new range of opportunities that Malaysian organisations can benefit from, but few have actually taken advantage of this potential.
…
Ross Dawson, chairman of Advanced Human Technologies says it will take around four to five years before Malaysia will be able to fully leverage on the power of crowdsourcing.

“Realistically, it will take that long to develop a world class (crowdsourcing) platform here,” he says. “Companies (here) need to be aware that there may be many different ways to use crowdsourcing. This is very important for Malaysian organisations if they want to be competitive and growing in a globalised economy. We’ll increasingly see a gap between those organisations who take advantage of such opportunities and those that don’t.”

However, Dawson feels that the nation is off to a good start so far and believes that great possibilities lie ahead for Malaysia due to its knowledge based economy and the abilities of its workforce.

“I would say that Malaysia is on par with other countries in this region. One of the advantages that Malaysia has is that the English language is pretty widely spoken here,” he adds.

A third article summarizes How to best carry out crowdsourcing, drawing on interviews with both Ross and Carl Esposti, CEO of Massolution, who also spoke at the event, as well as from Chapter 4 of my book Getting Results From Crowds on how to use crowds. (Available as a free download from the book website).

I have some more engagements coming up soon working with the directors of major Malaysian organizations. Malaysia is one of the most dynamic countries in South-East Asia, and the initiatives in crowdsourcing undertaken by the government provide ample evidence of their forward-looking mentality.

Can Facebook-informed algorithms know you better than your mother?

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This morning I was interviewed on the national breakfast program Sunrise about whether algorithms can assess our personality better than those who are closest to us.

Click on the image below to view the segment.

Sunrise130115_2

The segment described some just-released research titled Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which says:

This study compares the accuracy of personality judgment—a ubiquitous and important social-cognitive activity—between computer models and humans. Using several criteria, we show that computers’ judgments of people’s personalities based on their digital footprints are more accurate and valid than judgments made by their close others or acquaintances (friends, family, spouse, colleagues, etc.). Our findings highlight that people’s personalities can be predicted automatically and without involving human social-cognitive skills.

The personality-assessment algorithm was solely based on Facebook likes made by participants, with results compared to the assessments of people who know them well. As little as 150 likes was sufficient to provide a more accurate personality assessment than a family member such as a parent, while 300 likes enabled a better assessment than a spouse.

What was perhaps more interesting was the claim that “computer personality judgments have higher external validity when predicting life outcomes such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health; for some outcomes, they even outperform the self-rated personality scores.”

The potential implications are profound. Article co-author Wu Youyou said “In this context, the human-computer interactions depicted in science fiction films such as ‘Her’ seem to be within our reach.”

Being able to interact with people in a way tailored to their personalities and designed to generate particular responses is certainly a fair way beyond being able to assess personalities accurately, but we are rapidly heading in that direction.

These findings are unlikely to give pause to people sharing their lives – and personalities – on social media, but we absolutely need to be aware quite how deep the insights about ourselves we are sharing in our everyday online behaviors.