Common Approach UnCommon Results: Crowdsourcing

Common Approach UnCommon Results

Common Approach Uncommon Results, has transformed how senior executives think about creating sustainable business change in organisations. The book is available from the publishers, www.Ideas-Warehouse.com or Amazon.co.uk

If has been translated into Chinese, and as the original print run sold in record time a second print run of 15,000 books is being printed.

Summary of the book

Tackle the biggest barrier to performance – adoption of your improvement initiatives. By everyone in the company. The easy way. Today.

‘Common Approach – Uncommon Results’ reveals a proven approach which is simple and practical, and achieves staggering levels of adoption. It comes from the day-to-day experience working with more than 500 organisations, including Schroders, Lockheed Martin, Orange, Toyota, Accenture BPO, GlaxoSmithKline and Northrop Grumman.

The book shows us how this highly effective approach can be applied in diverse corporate situations, from outsourcing to fast growth, while ensuring regulatory compliance from top to bottom.

Learn how to transform your thinking so that you can set a strategy, get it implemented and adopted, and experience measurable results – no matter what your industry:
- ‘We reduced the worldwide SAP implementation for 40 countries from 36 months to just 18 months’
- ‘It provides demonstrable corporate governance, improving business performance and pinpointing shortcomings costing more than £18m’
- ‘It has played a significant part in winning more than £30 million of new business and reducing costs by £5.7m and projected annual savings of £4.5 million per annum.’
- ‘We brought white-collar productivity up to match our envied blue-collar levels’

For a longer summary of the book

How do you really deliver results on all the initiatives and projects in your company? The answer is Adoption. Through Adoption, everyone in your company ensures that your strategy gets implemented and you obtain visible results from your initiative.

We put this succinctly: R=IxA2 (Results = Initiatives x Adoption2)

Maximising Results by successful Adoption of the transformational changes driven out of the Initiatives. In other words, it does not matter how many initiatives (projects, exercises, and programmes, whatever) you throw at people if no one adopts the results of them. Typical initiatives include Six Sigma, software implementation (SAP, Siebel etc), Cost Reduction, Sarbanes Oxley and outsourcing programmes.

While this may sound obvious, the corporate landscape is rife with these initiatives in progress, where little or no thought has been put into how to make sure that the rest of the organisation actually adopt and own whatever improvement is advocated. Little surprise then that the adoption rate (and hence the success rate) of initiatives is pitifully low in many companies.

Gaining adoption is a challenge, not least because it involves changes in behaviour and attitudes. Inspirational leadership helps kick-start adoption throughout the company, but it cannot sustain the necessary continuous improvement required for companies to stay competitive. Adoption has measurable results, as the dramatic benefits obtained by the success stories reveal.

Adoption means communicating the changes required of people – and getting people to make the changes. The approach we are suggesting is applicable to virtually every initiative and it is achievable as it makes change as painless as possible. This is where a common language is required – an operational language which can describe the changes in activities, behaviour and results that are expected.

This language describes activities, roles and measures, and is managed through the use of a Common Operational Platform. It manages processes, documents, resources and metrics – and the relationships between them. This is made possible by current IT infrastructure and software. Use of this Common Operational Platform enhances accountability and serves to further adoption. And once the COP is in place it can be applied to other initiatives and therefore increases their return on investment.

Whilst this may seem interesting in practice, most companies already have a range of initiative's at different stages. Therefore the book takes 5 typical initiatives (outsourcing, compliance, Six Sigma, software package implementation, and rapid growth) and considers the most effective way of implementing the COP alongside them depending on the phase of the initiative.

From the experience of countless client engagements we have identified 7 simple steps to develop and manage the Common Operational Platform. These steps build on on the principles of Adoption, but sets them out in a practical blueprint for action.

Crowdsourcing - social outsourcing

Friday, June 30, 2006

Crowdsourcing
David Rowan

Sometimes a new trend catches on so quickly that, if you sit well back and wear protective goggles, you can just catch its vapour trail as it zips through the culture. That has just happened with a concept known as "crowdsourcing" that you’re about to hear a lot more of. A month ago, nobody had even heard of it. Indeed, on May 18, Google could find only three web pages that mentioned it. Suddenly, though, there are 400,000 "crowdsourcing" references on the net and rising. What on Earth could have popularised a new coinage so quickly?

The answer is another astute article in Wired, the digital-culture magazine that keeps tapping presciently into significant innovations. Last year, this column explored "the long tail", an emerging business concept defined by Wired’s editor, Chris Anderson, as the slowly diminishing trail of demand for niche products, such as obscure DVDs, that, thanks to the net, can now find an audience without any of the traditional marketing costs. A year on, Wired journalist Jeff Howe has identified a new way in which businesses are using the net to connect thousands of strangers in order to make cash. But this time, rather than customers, the strangers are serving as a cheap pool of labour.

Think of it as an extension of outsourcing, whereby a business contracts out certain tasks to save money. Rather than going offshore to find cheap workers, the clued-in digital business is now simply using the vast pool of skills available from the online public. Anyone with a modem and net connection is invited to perform a task or provide a digital product in return for a small fee. Yet because the online crowd is now so huge, businesses are finding what they’re asking for despite the pitiful wages.

Take the business of stock photography. In the old world, if your magazine or corporate brochure needed a few images to perk it up, a conventional picture library would sell you the reproduction rights for perhaps £100 each. Suddenly, that has all changed, thanks to new online libraries such as iStockphoto that have cut the price to as low as 60p. The secret? The 22,000 amateur photographers who between them have uploaded 851,000 royalty-free snaps to the site, all now available for anyone to browse and acquire. The photographers earn a few pennies, the customer gets a bargain. And in the middle, the stock library provides the online exchange that makes it all possible.

Science companies are also looking to the crowd as a source of low-cost labour. InnoCentive is a web-based community where businesses such as Procter & Gamble and Boeing post R&D problems and seek help from the crowd in solving them in exchange for cash. Jill Panetta, InnoCentive’s chief scientific officer, claims that the site has solved at least 30 per cent of the challenges set, many of them worked through by hobbyists rather than professionals. Other online exchanges are even more wide-ranging. Amazon Mechanical Turk, an offshoot of the bookstore, lets anyone post requests for others to perform what it calls "human intelligence tasks", from transcribing podcasts to verifying legal documents. Take the job, and you’ll earn anything from pennies to pounds.

Karl Marx might have had concerns: as competition squeezes wages, it’s hard to see how workers might empower themselves. But that’s capitalism for you. Somewhere along the line, the commune became just another online exchange.

david.rowan@thetimes.co.uk

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