If you’re looking for some of the first adopters of crowdsourcing, look no further than information technology (IT) teams. As some of the biggest advocates for this groundbreaking approach, IT teams have long utilized crowdsourcing as a way to boost their company’s capacity.
Sourcing, facilitation, and processing are three of the most common ways IT teams have streamlined their approach. In this post, we’ll take a brief look at how they currently utilize crowdsourcing.
3 ways IT teams leverage crowdsourcing
IT sourcing & procurement
A company cannot sustainably grow with one mind alone.
To create new products or solutions, it helps to get input (or inspiration) from the crowd—especially the one around you. Based on this concept, IT can create systems and structures to gather data from contributors in the vastness of the internet or within a set group of individuals, such as their own organization.
For example, instead of bringing in consultants to help think up a new product, the IT team can create a system that directly asks employees about their ideas.
In this way, IT sources knowledge and insight from a private crowd that specializes in both the customer and the product. (Similar to the way ScaleHub uses private crowds to handle sensitive data.)
Data capture & extraction
It’s no secret that accurate data is crucial to making informed decisions and keeping customers happy. But a high volume of data can burden organizations with limited resources. Data entry clerks, particularly those with the skills needed to understand complex documents, come at a very high cost. It also isn’t easy to expand this team when document volume suddenly or unexpectedly increases.
Because of this resource issue, IT teams and business users alike are tasked with collaborating to procure, and then support, automated data capture solutions.These solutions can be difficult to manage, don’t always capture data accurately, and are time-consuming to support.
That’s where IT teams again benefit from crowdsourcing. IT teams can send data through a crowdsourcing system, such as ScaleHub’s, for faster, more accurate–and scalable–processing.
Take health insurance as an example. New applications used to be scanned into a company’s digital system and then exception handling or verification was done by team members, costing time and money. Instead, scanned applications from digital systems can be snippeted, scrambled, and sent to the crowd for verification or handling exceptions.
IT enablement
IT-enabled crowdsourcing can be defined as “technology-enabled outsourcing of tasks through an open call to the masses via the internet.”
For example, the engineering or maintenance side of an IT team often deals with a number of open support tickets. These digital pleas for assistance can vary in need, such as product expertise or further insight into tackling a specific issue. IT can take this work to the crowd by using contributors to answer inquiries of a specific type or nature, like less complex, user app challenges, for example. Outsourcing in this way helps IT support teams to close tickets at a faster pace.
Aside from using an internet “all-call,” IT teams sometimes create online interfaces as a way to put out those calls to specific types of technology experts to submit work. Or, they can choose to source from within, using internal IT resources who might have extra or unbillable time in a day to help out with certain types of support tickets.
Collect, enable, process
Crowdsourcing has long been a benefit to IT teams and company data. It’s allowed them to source new ideas, input, and expertise. It’s also enabled them to gather support on key issues and process company data.
ScaleHub can help augment the data capture and extraction tools for IT teams and their companies with our signature solution. Find out more on ScaleHub’s Youtube Channel or schedule a demo.
