A new Internet Gold Rush called Crowdsourcing

Since the rise of outsourcing in the early 90’s, businesses have been utilizing outside talent in new and meaningful ways. With a plethora of pure play service providers offering every imaginable kind of business service on an outsourced basis, we have seen companies engage these companies for performing accounting, payroll, collection, software development, lead generation, help desk services, R&D, HR management, legal research… you name it, it is being done.

As a result of the popularity of outsourcing, businesses have become highly globalized, and we have seen the rise of India and China in the world market on account of their IT and manufacturing expertise respectively.

The latest evolution of this trend threatens to open up outsourcing to a new dimension where the traditional powerhouses will not be the only players – you and I and every living breathing human being with an Internet connection will be able to jump in and collaborate with companies everywhere.

Welcome to the world of Crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing is a method that involves and uses “crowds” (i.e., large, undefined, randomly distributed, undirected, unsupervised groups of people) to performs tasks and accomplish goals.

Here are some live examples of successful crowdsourcing.

INTERNET GOLD RUSH

In March 2000, Goldcorp, the Canadian gold mining group, made available to the public via the Internet, around 400 MB of its geological survey data from its Red Lake, Ontario, property. They called it the “Goldcorp Challenge” and offered a prize of $575,000 prize to anyone who could analyze the data and suggest places where gold could be found. The mining community was flabbergasted. Goldcorp's geologists were appalled at the idea of exposing their super-secret data to the world. But Rob McEwen, Goldcorp’s Chairman and CEO, pressed on. The prize was won by an Australian firm called Fractal Graphics. Goldcorp claims that the contest produced 110 targets, over 80% of which proved productive; yielding 8 million ounces of gold, worth more than $3 billion. [Read more about it here: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/59/mcewen.html]

LAW ENFORCEMENT

In 2007, the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition (TBSC) partnered with a private organization called BlueServo to utilize and expose on the Internet a network of cameras and sensors on the Texas-Mexico border. Called the Virtual Community Watch, it was an innovative real-time surveillance program designed to empower the public to proactively participate in fighting border crime and illegal immigration. Citizens can sign up as Virtual Texas Deputies to participate in border surveillance through this public network on the Internet. These Virtual Texas Deputies from around the country monitor the streaming video from these cameras 24/7 and report any suspicious activities directly to the Border Sheriffs via email. With the success of this initiative, in January 2008 the State of Texas announced it would install 200 mobile cameras along the Texas-Mexico border to enable anyone with an Internet connection to watch the border and report sightings of alleged illegal immigrants to border patrol agents.

Check out some of these Live Border Cameras here:

http://www.texasborderwatch.com/vcw.php.

MOBILE PHONE DESIGN

As recently as April-June 2009, LG crowdsourced the design of their next mobile phone. In a job posted to crowdSPRING in April 2009, LG has issued a challenge to people everywhere: Design the future of mobile communication device. Here is what the listing actually said:

“Predict what's next. What do you think mobile phones should look like in 2, 5, or 10 years? We are asking for your help. We're NOT looking for a long list of specs or phone ideas that already exist. We're looking for a cool new concept or "big idea" supported by usage scenario illustrations. Understand how your idea will be judged, and increase your chances of winning. Keep in mind, the LG logo must be included somewhere. Use the logo files provided (one is for light background and one is for dark). And the prize for the winner or winners? $20,000 first award, $10,000 second award, $5,000 third award or one of the 40 (40!) $1000 awards that also come with a free LG cell phone.”

The competition closed on June 8th and the winner is scheduled to be announced on July 7th.

AUDITING EXPENSES FILED BY YOUR MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT

The U.K. newspaper – Guardian – recently launched a crowdsourcing application called “Investigate your MP's expenses”.

The landing page says it all: “Join us in digging through the 700,000 documents of MPs' expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP's expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing. (Update, Thurs evening: More added now and more coming all the time. Check back if you haven't found your MP yet).”

Each MP's expenses and claims are presented as a set of images, and users can determine what entries there are on a page, and decide whether the page is unimportant, interesting, "interesting but known" or worthy of investigation.

As of June 18th, the site had 77252 pages of documents, of which 23891 are unreviewed.

The newspaper smugly claims, with a jab at its closest rival, The Daily Telegraph:

“The Daily Telegraph may have had a team of 25 journalists working on the MPs' expenses, but within 10 minutes of the launch on Thursday afternoon of the Guardian's crowdsourcing application to examine them, there were 323 people, almost all outside the Guardian, doing the same task. Within half an hour of the launch, more than 2,000 pages had been reviewed. Future additions to the application may include a ‘top analysis’ ranking for those who have contributed most to sifting the pages - a task which the Telegraph's team, despite having a three-month lead, is not believed to have been able to achieve.”

Click here to launch it: http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/

VIDEO GAME DESIGN

A game publisher by the name of Roundhouse Interactive is putting the task of designing their next Video Game into the hands of a large community of gamers. The publisher says it will rely mainly on the whims of a potentially six-figure-large community for the major decisions in the game's creation. The game, which is currently going by the code name The Game Cartel, is expected to be a console game available in December 2010.

You may read more about this here: http://m.news.com/2166-12_3-10267336-52.html.

DEFINING CROWDSOURCING

Having reviewed the above examples, we can now define that Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task that is traditionally performed by an employee or contractor of a company, and outsourcing it to a large, undefined, geographically disparate and largely undirected community of people in the form of an open call. It is a distributed problem-solving and production model.

Some claim that the word was coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article. (Click here for the original article: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html)

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CROWDSOURCING AND OUTSOURCING

The difference between crowdsourcing and traditional outsourcing is that crowdsourcing outsources a task or problem to an undefined public rather than to a specific organization.

BENEFITS OF CROWDSOURCING

There could be many benefits to crowdsourcing, such as:

LOW COST: Tasks can be performed at much lower cost than traditional outsourcing.

SPEED OF EXECUTION: Problems can be acted upon very quickly by a large body of people.

HARNESSING A LARGER POOL OF TALENT: Through crowdsourcing, a company would probably tap into a much larger pool of talent than it would via traditional outsourcing.

PAYMENT ONLY UPON SUCCESS: Payment is contingent only upon good and acceptable result.

GREATER MARKET INTELLIGENCE: By listening to the crowd, organizations can gain first-hand insight on customer desires.

EASIER BRAND BUILDING: By involving the user (consumer) community in a product design initiative, the company stands to build a brand name more easily than through traditional advertising.

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE FORETELL?

Only the future will answer that question. But meanwhile we can observe that crowdsourcing is a phenomenon that is gaining fast acceptance in the business community and beyond. It has the potential to affect business quite fundamentally and can usher in radical changes to business models and business processes everywhere.

Welcoming Prism

Prism, a new Open Source product from Mozilla, enables you to convert Web Applications into Desktop Applications. That's a simplistic statement for the sake of brevity. For details, this is a good website to check out: https://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/

You may also download Prism from that site or by clicking here: http://people.mozilla.com/~mfinkle/prism/prism-0.8-win32.exe

Prism is an excellent development in the open source world.

Is it better than AIR or Silverlight? That’s hardly the point. We want the software industry to be a vibrant marketplace of creative, competing products and solid advancement. Prism promotes just that, and does it well.

With the tremendous polarization happening in the software industry — e.g., in ERP, BI, Datawarehousing — and with Oracle gobbling up Sun (and Java), it is important that the industry always has solid, comparable, competing options. I like MS Office, but I lament the absence of any real competitor to keep Microsoft on their toes.

Doesn’t anyone else feel that way? I see ADOBE guys bitching about Prism, and some others skeptical about the benefits of the technology itself. They are missing the point. Regardless of whether PRISM is your choice or not, it is an Advantage++ for the industry. That is the point.

I myself am a heavy used of AIR, and have just begun checking out Prism.

Kudos to the Mozilla team.

What is Business Process Management (BPM)?

DEFINITION

BPM is a discipline that seeks to study, analyze and understand the processes that run a business, with the aim of deriving methodologies that could be selectively or collectively used for harnessing, improving and creating processes to achieve operational efficiencies, institutionalized knowledge and organizational resilience.

SOME EXPLANATIONS

“discipline” = formal and structured approach

“study, analyze” = inquire into and model the processes; modeling is the recommended approach

 “understand” = derive and define a collection of theories, concepts and ideas that lead to the development of a methodology; 

“methodologies” = methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools

“selectively or collectively” = the theories, concepts and ideas will not all apply equally well to every situation; the BPM expert must choose and decide what best applies under what circumstances; experience matters!!!

“harnessing the processes” = BPM must “manage” the processes; 

“operational efficiencies” = examples: business optimization (better business); business agility (quicker reaction to changes); alignment with the needs of the stakeholders (including customers); streamlining (better workflow); flexibility; standardization of processes within the enterprise; cost optimization; manpower optimization; automation optimization; etc. – you name it – take the holistic approach. 

“institutionalized knowledge” = the knowledge about the business processes should belong to the organization and not reside inside the heads of individuals and be lost when these individuals leave the company; successful BPM must create a knowledge repository that belongs to the organization.

“organizational resilience” = ultimately BPM must seek to make the organization more robust; more immune to threats; more likely to survive in conditions where others fail; more likely to thrive in any market condition.

The Case for Business Agility in the SAP Dominated Enterprise

This article was published in the JOURNAL OF PRACTICAL CONSULTING.

Full article: http://www.regent.edu/acad/global/publications/jpc/vol1iss1/dasgupta/dasgupta.htm

Synopsis: 

Business agility can be achieved in a SAP dominated enterprise by creating process-centric systems through the use of Business Process Management (BPM) techniques and tools. Such a system would be deployed through the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) methodology on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform. We should seek to (a) create Process Centric Systems by using BPM to converge business applications towards process-oriented enterprise computing by capturing all process-knowledge via modeling, (b) embrace a SOA-based open systems architecture using SAP's Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA) as the blueprint for implementing a service oriented business architecture through SAP NetWeaver, and (c) adopt MDA as our system deployment methodology by using Model Driven Architecture (MDA) as the modeling-based software development approach that ultimately deploys the processes on the computer. SAP's Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) already embraces SOA and BPM and can be extended to utilize MDA concepts. ESA strategy is about better aligning IT with the business. But ESA goes far beyond a technical theme or fad. ESA is the dawning of new agile, process centric focus within IT organizations.

Feedback to: probal.dasgupta@sapbureau.com

The business rationale for Model Driven Architecture in software engineering

Today life comes at you FAST, and business conditions often change rapidly. How quickly you can react to internal and external changes usually spells the difference between mere survival and MARKET LEADERSHIP. Companies must, therefore, have Business Agility.

Business Agility is often dependent on IT agility. You need a flexible IT architecture that enables you to quickly implement new, innovative business processes, without changing core business engines.

Unfortunately, traditional I.T. is not agile. By the time the business analyst understands what you need and writes the functional specs and gets them approved by you and writes the technical specs and give that to the architects to design the change and the programmers get the program specs and they write the code…. You get the idea.

By the time traditional I.T. delivers, the business rules have changed, and you begin the change implementation cycle once again. As a result, I.T. is always 4-6 months behind where the business needs it to be, and it is not a question of better hardware, better people, better training or more money. The solution is not India.

The solution is Model Driven Architecture – a paradigm shift in software engineering.

Let’s rewind to 1989. A computer visionary and evangelist by the name of Chris Stone went around trying to convince the largest companies to fund a vendor-neutral “think tank” and software standards organization to invent solutions for an increasingly complex IT landscape. The result was the Object Management Group (OMG).

Step-1: OOPS

- The first focus of OMG was on Object Oriented Systems, because objects do allow developers to operate different levels of abstraction, thereby greatly reducing the complexity and the time needed to develop software.

- Object Oriented Technology surely narrowed the gap between Business and I.T. but could never close it, because there is still the need of the “interpreter” (the business analyst) to tell I.T. what Business wants.

Step-2: Pretty Pictures

- Business people understand graphical representation of ideas more easily than textual representation.

- But traditional I.T. is not terribly fond of drawing hundreds of diagrams just so business can understand what they want, because when everything is approved, these diagrams are nothing but “pretty pictures”.

- I.T. then has to manually convert the “pretty pictures” into laborious code before the business model can be implemented on a computer system.

Step-3: The Dream

- Often we have been told that everything begins with a dream.

- In this case, someone dreamed: What if the “pretty pictures” could be magically converted into executable code?

The result was MDA. 

What is MDA?

MDA is a software engineering methodology and a collection of toolsets.

Step-1: PLATFORM INDEPENDENT MODEL (PIM)

- MDA empowers business units (e.g., Sales department) to build complete and fully validated business models independent of I.T., without bothering about the technical implementation of the model.

- The models are built using Business Management tool. These are the “pretty pictures”.

- The BPM tool builds semantics into these “pretty pictures” (the models) that are machine readable and encode both structural and action parameters. So other tools can automatically determine how to implement the “pretty pictures” on a computer system.

- This Business Model is called the Platform Independent Model (PIM) because these models are completely technology ignorant.

Step-2: PLATFORM SPECIFIC MODEL (PSM)

- Once approved by the business unit, I.T. can take the PIM and prepare the technical architecture based on the target deployment platform (e.g., J2EE, JSF, WebSphere, Oracle).

- Based on the technical architecture and other target specific details of the technology, transformation rules are applied to automatically convert the Business Model into a Technical Model, which is called the Platform Specific Model (PSM).

- The PSM is the “technology aware” version of the business model.

Step-3; EXECUTABLE MODEL

- Using model-to-model transformation rules and transformation engines, the MDA tools generate source code from the PSM.

- The source code is then compiled, linked and deployed on the target platform.

- This is the Executable Model, which is also a type of PSM.

Some great advantages of MDA:

(1) BUSINESS AGILITY

- The business units need not tell I.T. what they want. They can load their BPM tool and directly build a model of what they want.

- I.T. can directly take the Business Model and take the necessary steps to implement it without having to ask the business unit any questions.

- Since the technical deployment of the business model is largely an automated process, the time to implement is quite minimal.

- This gives you a Superbly Agile I.T. that can respond very rapidly to the demands of the business.

(2) GREAT COST SAVINGS

- Mission-critical software can continue to be in use for decades, suffering constant upgrades to cope with shifting requirements and changing technologies. 

- With MDA, you get Maintainable Business Models instead of Maintainable Code.

- So maintenance is very easy because you change the Business Model and regenerate the executable code.

- You don’t have to payroll an army of coders for software development and maintenance.

- A Gartner Report calls MDA “outsourcing buster technology” and one that provides equal or better ROI compared to outsourcing I.T.

(3) ZERO MAINTENANCE WORRIES

- Most of the time of an I.T. department in medium and large corporations is consumed by maintenance.

- With MDA you have zero maintenance worries.

(4) A TRANSFORMED I.T. DEPARTMENT

- Freed from maintenance worries, freed from a very laborious maintenance process, and freed from the fear of legacy code, I.T. can focus on innovation.

- I.T. payroll dollars can be better spent in hiring quality rather than quantity.

(5) FUTURE PROOF TECHNOLOGY

- When it becomes necessary to adopt new technology, no lengthy migration to new platform is required.

- I.T. needs to incorporate the new technology in its model-to-model transformation, and regenerate a new PSM from the PIM.

- Your MDA-driven application is Future Proof. Forever.

(6) INSTITUTIONALIZED KNOWLEDGE

- One of the less discussed benefits, but perhaps of the highest value to the company in the long-term, is that MDA leads to institutionalization of knowledge.

- Knowledge that is usually lost through employee attrition will now mostly be retained by the company.

Quick recap with reference to BPM:

BPM is most useful when used as part of a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) process.

--1-- The BPM tool is used to create end-to-end, complete and validated business model in a pure business environment without being aware of technology. This is the Platform Independent Model (PIM).

--2-- When the business people are happy with the business model, then I.T. will architect the system (cherry pick technologies to be used, design the n-tier architecture, etc.), write the Model-to-Model transformation rules using the transformation engine of choice (e,g., QVT – Query View Transform) and generate the Platform Specific Model (PSM) – which is your Business Model that is “technology aware’.

--3-- Then code generators will be used to convert the PSM into source code, which can then be compiled, linked and deployed on the desired platform.

Step-2 above is a “one time” activity until the target platform changes. So as long as the target platform does not change, the MDA process described above can implement “maintenance and enhancement” type changes in the Business Model virtually at the touch of a button and utilize the pre-programmer model-to-model transformation mechanism to generate the new source code.

This is a useable methodology today and is the reason why BPMI merged with OMG (Object Management Group) – the creator of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) in 2004 and is now an integral initiative within OMG along with advances in MDA thought.