Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Trend Report - Businesses Starting to Switch to Internal Crowdsourcing

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 Six years ago, Jeff Howe coined term crowdsourcing to describe the process of outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. However, more and more companies are now turning to internal crowdsourcing, according to Bitrix24 CEO Dmitry Valyanov.

"We are seeing a significant shift now. Whereas a few years ago companies would simply outsource their work through eLance.com or other crowdsourcing sites [see DoNanza story], now they are using more and more 'internal crowdsourcing', that relying on collaboration among their own employees to produce results. Having seen the potential of crowdsourcing through external experience, they are trying to replicate this effective method inside the company when possible."

Social enterprise networks, also known as social intranets, are the driver behind this change. With major software companies from Microsoft to SalesForce investing hundreds of millions of dollars, it's clear that this trend will continue to develop intensely.

"Virtually every major client we have uses an extranet to bring freelancers and contractors into the fold. They are now using crowdsourcing sites only to locate suitable candidates, while actual collaboration is happening on their own platform. This makes sense, because a social intranet typically has the necessary collaboration tools, while crowdsourcing sites usually solve other problems – like payments, for example, or providing feedback about freelancers or clients."

Bitrix24 has experienced rapid growth since its launch in April 2012 and was recently praised by Forbes.com,  thanks in part to its decision to target small businesses, rather than the large business segment targeted by other social intranet providers. Over 15000 companies have signed up for the service so far.

"We've made Bitrix24 absolutely free to any company with 12 employees or fewer. We really do believe that the future of social intranet is in small to midsize companies. Once the advantages and the ease of adoption are demonstrated, it's really an easy sell from that point."

[Via - NicheGeek.Com]

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