The rapidly building wave of online outsourcing and crowdsourcing

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The Age today has an interesting article titled Outsourcing on steroids that looks at the array of online technologies that are enabling the outsourcing of small tasks and the crowdsourcing of design, innovation, and other key business functions.

I’ve noticed that in just the last few weeks mainstream media coverage of online service exchanges and crowdsourcing tools is picking up. As the article in the The Age concludes, “it’s certain crowd sourcing is a key business trend for the future”. The

The article quotes me in two different sections:

Although odesk and similar sites such as elance.com are known for being a meeting place where businesses can access very low cost services, crowd sourcing is not just about finding the cheapest service provider possible.

Futurist Ross Dawson says: “Online services exchanges are places where anyone anywhere can get people to perform services; it’s about the development of a global talent economy. Some services are commoditised – you might want someone to count the number of tennis balls in a photo for the lowest price possible. But they also allow you to find the best person for the job and price isn’t always the primary factor why you hire someone, sometimes it’s more about finding talented people. I use odesk and the last person I hired wasn’t in Egypt or Latvia he was in New York.”

This idea of how best to tap the most talented – rather than the cheapest – professionals in the global market is the subject of my next book. I’ll be writing a lot more about this on my blog.

Later in the article:

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Agency co-creation: very hard to make it work but that’s where the most value lies

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There’s a great article in the latest issue of B&T Today on how Westpac, one of Australia’s big four banks, is approaching working with its advertising and creative agencies. Here are a few choice excerpts from the article, which is well worth a read in its entirety.

Jee Moon, director of brand and marketing at Westpac [said] that an agency roster based on co-creation, not simply collaboration, is key to establishing and maintaining a strong brand identity.

She added the “one stop shop”, integrated agency model in Australia had “never materialised” and that a rostered agency model based on co-creation in which agencies do not simply coexist but coproduce was key to developing and maintaining a strong brand positioning.

“At Westpac we have moved from a contractual agency model, which we had with the Red House when there was little to bind the agencies together apart from a piece of paper, to a system of collaboration where our partners work together as a community of experts, and are currently striving for a true, co-creation model,” Jee said of her agency partners The Campaign Palace, Yello and Lavender.

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ABC TV Interview: How business can create value with Twitter

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ABC TV ran a segment a few days ago on how companies are using Twitter to create value, including an interview with me on how businesses can use Twitter effectively.

This should be a topic of particular interest to small and mid-sized companies. If you are interested in learning more, SME Tech Summit in Sydney on 1 December will include specific in-detail coverage of how your company can use Twitter (as well as other social media tools) to build your success.

Comments made during the program include:

* Experts say Twitter is here to stay

* Twitter has become a legitimate business tool

* When you don’t have much money to spend, Twitter can be an excellent way to promote your business

* You need to be conversational and human to engage your customers

* There are ways that companies in any industry to use Twitter

* It is hard to do properly, and you do need to be consistent if you start

* Twitter is here to stay as part of companies’ branding strategy

Tech23: SaaS/ In the cloud panel: Angusta, IPScape, MyCosm, Tagmotion

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A few quick notes about the four companies presenting on the SaaS/ In the Cloud panel at Tech23 (for background on the event see my post from this morning). A very impressive line-up.

Angusta Systems. Uses combinatorial algorithms to help banks manage their physical cash inventory – a solid niche apparently worth over $100 million in value to each of the big Australian banks.

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The immense value of expertise location will help drive enterprise social media

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I have been interested in the field of expertise location for over a decade, from back when knowledge managers were building ‘corporate yellow pages’ and other tools to find the best expertise in the organization.

Unless a large organization can bring the most relevant expertise within the firm to bear on the problems and issues at hand, it really has no reason to exist. A smaller more nimble organization could do as good a job with lower costs.

I have written about expertise location frequently over the last years, both in looking at how enhancing organizational networks can generate greater revenues and efficiency, and how social technologies can support effective expertise location, including on the role of enterprise social network software and several years ago about the use of blogs to support expertise location.

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Today the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article called Who Knows What? describing the issue of expertise location and explaining how blogs, wikis, social networks, and tagging can support finding the most relevant knowledge in the organization.

This is hardly new stuff, but large organizations are now reaching the point where they understand that social media are important organizational tools, and have begun implementing some of these tools. This means there is in many cases the breadth of uptake required for effective expertise location.

In large, geographically distributed, professional organizations, expertise location can be a ‘killer app’ which provides immense return on the implementation of social computing. We have reached the point at which this could get real traction.

These issues are also addressed in detail in my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0.

[Hattip to @ariegoldshlager]

Why does Aardvark think I know how to learn to be a stripper?

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After a number of requests from friends I signed up for Aardvark recently. If you haven’t t come across it, it’s a social network for search, where your questions are given to whoever in your extended network is most likely to be able to answer them, as illustrated below.

aardvark.jpg

It’s an interesting idea which has got a lot of buzz though not a lot of uptake yet. I suspect that this approach to social search is more likely to get traction within an existing social network rather than a dedicated one, though it’s possible that it could take off, most likely initially in specific communities.

The nub of how Aardvark works is by using your nominated topics, which can be input either by yourself or others. I entered topics of ‘enterprise 2.0’ and ‘social networks’ and others have tagged me with ‘business’ and ‘social media’.

As such I was rather surprised when I received this email from Aardvark:

(Aardvark) Help someone with a question about *adult entertainment business*

Hi Ross,

Briana/20/F/…..,.. just asked a question I think you might be able to answer,

“What’s the best way to learn how to be a stripper?”

To answer, just reply to this message, and I’ll forward your email along to Briana.

As it happens I don’t know the answer. So why did Aardvark think that I might know?

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Keynote on Creating the Future of Media including Six Strategic Issues for publishers

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Yesterday I did a keynote for Publishers Australia on Creating the Future of Media, pointing to driving forces, key strategic issues, and action items for media companies today, with Iggy Pintado also presenting on leveraging social media in publishing.

The event attracted more attendees than any similar event organized by Publishers Australia so far, so clearly these issues are at the top of the agenda for the industry.

The slides to my presentation are below. As always, note that these slides are designed to accompany my presentation, NOT to be meaningful as stand-alone information. However many people tell me they still find value in the slides even without being able to attend my keynotes, so feel free to peruse them!

Creating the future of media: Keynote by Ross Dawson

View more presentations from rossdawson.

To complement the slides, here is a brief description of the Six Strategic Issues I covered in the presentation:

1. Scaling

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Inside Knowledge review of Implementing Enterprise 2.0

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I just came across Inside Knowledge magazine’s review of my most recent book, Implementing Enterprise 2.0.

Full details of the book including free chapters and the Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework mentioned in the review and pictured below are available on the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 website.

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Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework

It’s a useful review – here are a few excerpts:

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Catch-up with Peter Williams of Deloitte Digital – the intersection of digital and professional services

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I had a very interesting meeting yesterday with Deloitte Digital‘s CEO Peter Williams, someone who is always on the vanguard of innovation in professional services. A few things he mentioned about what they’re up to:

* Yammer (enterprise micro-blogging) has taken off and is getting substantial use across Deloitte Australia. They did a security test on Yammer for some clients and it came out solid. They are still using the free version though are talking to Yammer about a paid version.

* Deloitte has implemented an internal ‘Innovation Academy’ which among other functions enables idea submission and voting, which they’ve created by mashing up several tools. The system has generated ideas already worth $15 million to the company.

* One of the ideas was GreenID, a joint venture between Deloitte, Edentiti and Global Data Company that provides fast online identity verification for clients who have traditionally done this offline.

* They have also created an XBRL gateway to facilitate conversion of accounts into XBRL format.

* A collaboration with Cooperative Research Centre ACID yielded an interesting visualization and view of the mental models of how ideas are generated in the professional services frontline. Unfortunately this is not available online yet.

Lots of nice things happening here.

I recently wrote from my own experience about Six high-return initiatives for driving innovation in professional services, and Chapter 9 of my book Living Networks is primarily about how digital channels are changing how professional services firms operate.

Driving innovation in large professional service firms: Six high-return initiatives

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Over the last years I have spent significant time assisting professional services firms to drive innovation. This year I am finding that the economic climate is intensifying the focus on these issues rather than pushing them to the background.

The pressures that commoditize services are intensifying, local and global competition is increasing, and clients are seeking value in different forms than they have in the past. Another critical driver is the war for talent. Young, talented professionals show little interest in continuing to plough the furrow of long-established processes, however wax enthusiastic about creating new approaches to their work.

However there are many barriers to innovation in large professional firms, including billing imperatives, strong functional specialization, and often highly risk-averse cultures. Much of the management literature on innovation focuses on product development and design, and is not always relevant to a professional services environment.

I’ve written before about innovation in professional services, including the White Paper I wrote for SAP on Service Delivery Innovation and in Chapter 9 of Living Networks.

Here are some reflections on where I see the greatest potential for value-creation in the space.

DOMAINS FOR INNOVATION

There are several key domains for innovation for professional firms:

Services and products. In a rapidly changing business environment, providing the services that are most relevant to clients’ needs can provide real competitive advantage. The issue is not just in quickly generating new offerings, but also in packaging these so they can be readily communicated to clients by front-line professionals.

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