Operational excellence in IT services using enterprise crowdsourcing

The IT services industry has been undergoing a significant transformation over the last decade primarily driven by the global delivery model - services are provided from delivery centers across the globe based on skill and cost. While extremely effective a key challenge is being able to harness distributed knowledge, especially to drive operational and business process optimizations and a superior client experience. The knowledge about service requirements, client experience and delivery quality is in collective possession of different communities, such as clients, service designers and delivery teams. Current practices to discovering this distributed and unstructured knowledge are semi-automated, and as such they fail to scale and provide accurate insights on demand. Enterprise crowdsourcing provides a mechanism to harness the tacit knowledge from a large group of network-connected humans. In this paper we describe a novel approach to improving operational excellence, with focus on compliance posture, using enterprise crowdsourcing. We demonstrate how enterprise crowdsourcing accelerated deployment of a novel identity access management capability in a global IT service delivery center, reducing the time to discover the required knowledge by 80%. We discuss how the uncovered knowledge networks can be engaged for various on-going operational activities as well as large-scale business transformation initiatives. © 2013 IEEE.