Crowdsourcing is the new cloud computing – get with it, CIOs

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Nicole Laskowski.

When Aristotle said, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts," he could have been talking about crowdsourcing. The concept makes some IT leaders uncomfortable, no doubt, but problem solving — like computing — can be powerful when distributed. CIOs bent on leading the innovation charge need to figure out how social tools can help bring the trend into the enterprise, according to Christopher Sprague, executive partner with Gartner Inc.’s research arm.

The Data MillCity of Boston CIO Bill Oates gets it, Sprague told CIOs at the Society for Information Management’s (SIM) annual conference in Boston last week. Oates introduced a pair of mobile applications that’s changing how the city and its constituents interact. With Street Bump, a handheld device’s accelerometer and GPS help city workers locate potholes and road deficiencies. With Citizens Connect, city dwellers can file a work order — directly with the facilitator of the request — and then keep tabs on its progress…

"Today, 20% of all requests to the city come through Citizens Connect," Sprague said. Government agencies whose data is (at least theoretically) public information are perhaps a more natural fit for crowdsourcing than businesses where data is proprietary. But companies that are not required by law to make data public are also finding value in the practice, Sprague asserted. Cotton Inc., The Proctor & Gamble Co., Anheuser-Busch Companies LLC, and pharmaceutical research giants Pfizer Inc., Eli Lilly and Co. and GlaxoSmithKline plc. have posted problems on an open platform from InnoCentive Inc. Those posts can be accessed by a community of more than 300,000 registered "solvers" from around the world. (They play for a prize.)…

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