Научная статья на тему 'Сrowdsourcing as a tool of social management for company and a career guidance for young people'

Сrowdsourcing as a tool of social management for company and a career guidance for young people Текст научной статьи по специальности «СМИ (медиа) и массовые коммуникации»

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Ключевые слова
CROWDSOURCING / CROWD / INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY / INTERNET / BRAINSTORMING / HUMAN POTENTIAL / SOCIAL INTERACTION / CREATION NEW IDEAS FOR BUSINESS / MORAL SATISFACTION / INNOVATIONS

Аннотация научной статьи по СМИ (медиа) и массовым коммуникациям, автор научной работы — Фолометова В.Э., Низова Е.А.

Nowadays companies prefer using the tactics of crowdsourcing. This phenomenon is a powerful tool which is used for achieving an effective social interaction with consumers. Crowdsourcing transfers the production of goods, services to a new stage, to a new area in which more than a billion people communicate and interact through the Internet. Crowdsourcing does not destroy the business but just transforms it, and it makes companies to consider users as potential partners. This is an interesting and exciting process, it means that now we not just buy goods but also meaningfully participate in the process of their creation. The article is intended for a wide audience, ranging from students and teachers, to the people who actively using information technologies and the Internet.

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Текст научной работы на тему «Сrowdsourcing as a tool of social management for company and a career guidance for young people»

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КРАУДСОРСИНГ КАК ИНСТРУМЕНТ СОЦИАЛЬНОГО УПРАВЛЕНИЯ ДЛЯ КОМПАНИИ И ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОЙ ОРИЕНТАЦИИ ДЛЯ

МОЛОДЕЖИ

Сrowdsourcing as a tool of social management for company and a career guidance for young people

В. Э. Фолометова, Е.А. Низова Донской государственный технический университет, г. Ростов-на-Дону

Abstract. Nowadays companies prefer using the tactics of crowdsourcing. This phenomenon is a powerful tool which is used for achieving an effective social interaction with consumers. Crowdsourcing transfers the production of goods, services to a new stage, to a new area in which more than a billion people communicate and interact through the Internet. Crowdsourcing does not destroy the business but just transforms it, and it makes companies to consider users as potential partners. This is an interesting and exciting process, it means that now we not just buy goods but also meaningfully participate in the process of their creation. The article is intended for a wide audience, ranging from students and teachers, to the people who actively using information technologies and the Internet.

Key words: crowdsourcing, crowd, information technology, Internet, brainstorming, human potential, social interaction, creation new ideas for business, moral satisfaction, innovations.

Social media has changed the way of interacting with consumers. Now it is the time multi-user collaboration for the effective solution of business tasks. For efficiency of innovations it needs modern technologies, allowing to keep creative ideas at appropriate stages of development and to assess the impact after the completion of their implementation. It becomes especially important today, when the speed of changes of all processes is high in the world. And this can be done using the new technique of the work - in other words by crowdsourcing.

What is crowdsourcing? That term derives from two English words "the crowd" and "outsourcing". It was used for the first time in 2006, by a journalist Jeff Howe in the article The Rise of Crowdsourcing for the magazine "Wired". The crowdsourcing is a technology of using intellectual potential of the masses for achieving concrete economic, political and social tasks.

The Great Britain was a first country where the crowdsourcing technology was created . In 1714 the government of Great Britain established a prize of £20 000 for who suggests a reliable method of determining longitude on sailing ships. The problem was very urgent, as it was the reason of ships and trade goods' regular losses. It negatively affected the state Treasury.

The crowdsourcing is quite logical development, the evolution of business, which was passed through the millennium with humanity. At some time producers of different goods realized that they have to join in guilds. In guilds they can transfer each other different type of skills. The second stage was a mass production. This stage is associated better with cars of Henry Ford, when he decided to produce many of the same goods and gain significant savings due to the fact that these goods were not needed to fit each client and also goods can be produced partially in one country and partially in other. The third stage was a mass distribution. It became possible due to the development of transport. The goods began to spread around the world. The next stage was a mass marketing. And the last stage is a mass collaboration. It became possible because of development of internet technology. The mass collaboration is an opportunity for people all over the world to solve various kinds of tasks collectively.

The crowdsourcing in Russia was appeared because of initiative from the "top". When the government came to an idea that economy should develop with the help of innovative methods, the state corporations were obliged to implement innovation policy. But it wasn't explained for the state corporations what innov a-tions mean, where and how were to find these open innovations. Step by step state corporations started looking how it was made in the West. One by one began to come to the idea that crowdsourcing was the most suitable technology for the invention of innovations. German Gref was the first who came to this idea. From 2011 the crowdsourcing has been the leading technology in Sberbank.

Nowadays, there are many Russian and foreign crowdsourcing projects. The most famous Russian projects associated with crowdsourcing are Sberbank21 (http://sberbank21.ru), AlfaBank the Idea (http://idea.alfabank.ru), questions and answers mail.ru (http://otvet.mail.ru).

The most famous foreign examples are:

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, created mainly by volunteers;

InnoCentive is the company, inviting scientists for a fee of $10 thousand to $100 thousand to solve the challenges posed by such companies as Procter & Gamble, DuPont;

Threadless is the company of t-shirts manufacturing from Chicago. The design process consists of an online contest only. The winners of the weekly contest receive $2 thousand and their work is launched in manufacture;

YouTube is a popular video portal. In January 2012 the number of daily videos on the site reached 4 billion;

Google is the search engine, which for the first time gave the authority to determine the importance of the information in the hands of «the crowd».

So nowadays many companies prefer the following tactics of crowdsourcing. This technology can bring not only financial benefits, but also support for the organization itself. For the company crowdsourcing means the reduction of costs and getting a huge human potential for the solution of business-tasks.

But who are the participants in the crowdsourcing projects? There are experts, clients, partners, co-workers, students and any other people who will be selected by the company or organization which lead the project.

Why is it interesting for participants? First of all, it is a good opportunity for self-realization, using their experience and knowledge on the common sphere, students can find something they like to take a part in. Secondly, this is the promotion of career and an increas in their professional value for employers. The project can become some kind of a social lift. For example, the representatives of companies can employ the best participants and can give material remuneration, prizes and honors for excellent work.

The crowdsourcing is based on the principle of voluntariness: all the work is done by unpaid or low-paid fans, who spend their free time participating in different projects (they look for information, place, re-check it, generate ideas and perform a small operations, co-ordinate the activities of the others, etc). A person determines on his own how much time and how many efforts (and sometimes his own resources) one can spend on participation in a project.

For a final buyer, a user of the Internet or a person with a big experience in this issue crowdsourcing is an opportunity to create something for the benefit of the wider community, to get acquainted and communicate with new people, to get pleasure from personal abilities improvement and transferring the knowledge, which one possesses.

As the crowdsourcing uses the knowledge of many people, the most important component of the crowdsourcing is the collective mind (or a brainstorming). The crowdsourcing's interaction with the collective mind has 3 main forms:

Market forecasts, in which investors get the «information about the future», related to the expected results.

The crowdcasting or solution of specific problems by communication in the network.

A mass clash of ideas, which helps generating different decisions and makes crowdsourcing much more effective.

You've probably seen in advertisement of various companies the call to come up with some slogan or logo, or write a story of a product, and for this, the company promises to give you something. That is a classic example of using crowdsourcing.

For example, Ford motor Company, together with the site Filmaka.com organized a competition: people were supposed to make commercial movies, devoted to the car Ford Mustang. The best were shown on television, and the winner got a prize - a brand new Ford Mustang. It is interesting, that the videos made by enthusiasts, mostly were of high quality. Thus, the company almost reduced to zero the costs of professional advertisers' work.

With the growing popularity of the crowdsourcing its main defects became evident - for example, the useless "noise" of the ideas generated by users, the lack of volunteers' motivation, and also reduction in the quality of the final product.

Even Jeff Howe, citing the words of the science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, said that "90 per cent of the total content were nonsense".

To get rid of shortcomings, there are new technologies and generations of crowdsourcing, for example, sintellectual crowdsourcing, created by the Russian company Witology. The task of sintellectual crowdsourcing is to find many best ideas (and people), while the common crowdsourcing's aim is to single out one idea from many others.

These are 4 tasks for each crowdsourcing project:

1) The improvement of the products and creation of the innovations.

2) The optimization of business process.

3) The public expertise of large-scale initiatives

4) The crowd recruiting

And below, it will be told about 3 crowdsourcing specific project of Sberbank in Russia which I participated in. It was the first time in 2011 when crowdsourcing technology was used during the project «Sberbank-21», which gathered 120 000 Russian-speaking participants from 64 countries of the world.

Other project called «Ocheredey.net!» was launched in august 2011. As you know, waiting time was and is now an actual problem for major banks. That's why the participants discussed the reasons of appearance of queues and possible ways of dealing with them. Ambitious aim was set: 90% of clients should wait for no longer than 10 minutes in 90% of branch offices. And now the aim is reached, as many advanced clients use mobile and Internet Bank instead of visiting bank offices.

The third project called «Public review of the report on corporate social responsibility for 2012». Corporate social responsibility (or CSR) is a set of rules and principles, according to which a bank interact with interested parties and affects the economy, social sphere and ecology. The project allowed getting the feedback from the clients, staff and social active people in order to use the result later.

The crowdsourcing has been gaining its popularity from year to year. It has become one of the main source of feedback for Sberbank and other companies which use this technology. It is planned to use in future for taking important decisions and development of new products and services.

Usually the enthusiasts like me, who are engaged in such projects, don't try to earn much money, but they want to get moral satisfaction from the job and bring their ideas to life. The young people are motivated to find themselves, to be developed and to find a good job and to do what do they really like. The work must give pleasure for them, otherwise they will stop participating in the these projects.

Nowadays due to the development of the Internet it is possible to exercise on-line communication between people from different countries and continents, living in different time zones and social conditions. In the post-industrial world people are ready_to share their ideas with the others, if they feel that their work is useful for society. Young people are able to stand out against the background of the previous generations and to get new business contacts using their erudition and creative approach to problems solving. I believe that participation in the

crowdsourcing projects can become a significant factor of career guidance for young people who is searching for their own selves and is ready to spend their free time in achieving particular results and feeling that even their smallest actions can change the world.

Библиографический список

1. Каменева, Е. М. Толпотворчество [Электронный ресурс] //Красноярское общественно-деловое издание Dela.ru: [сайт]. [2011]. URL: http://www.dela.ru/articles/tolpotvorchestvo/ (дата обращения: 27.05.2015).

2. Максимов, Н. Н. Краудсорсинг как способ активизации развития персонала / Н. Н. Максимова, В. С. Паршина // Молодой ученый. — 2012. — №12. — С. 233-236.

3. Малюков, А. С. Вся правда о краудсорсинге в России [Электронный ресурс] // Онлайн конференция по Краудсорсингу, Краудфандингу и Краудинвестингу «CrowdConsulting 2013». URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIKmPUjj_Y&list=UUMFvqkkUSO_cnXqASKadYKg (дата обращения: 27.05.2015).

4. Хау Д. Краудсорсинг: Коллективный разум - будущее бизнеса; Перевод с англ. М.: Альпина Паблишер, 2012.

Научный руководитель: Хвоевская Л. И.

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