Crowdsourcing within the company

In a large company, there are many talented employees that are available and can be targeted for the Crowdsourcing concept. Personally, I know many very smart Information Technology individuals that could be leveraged for important projects. For example, SharePoint Administrators know how this technology works so when business starts to develop SharePoint based applications, business can leverage the knowledge of the SharePoint administrators during design to avoid some of the pitfalls. I have seen some business units tap into knowledge during the hiring process to ensure the right developers are hired. But this only happens when the hiring managers know administrators well, not as the best practice company wide.

In a big company, not everyone knows each other. To make it more difficult, in most cases, people don't know the strength and weakness of the employees in other department, business units, or sometime within the same department. Crowdsourcing in the narrowed sense can be adapted into company's strategy, especially in the information technology field. Many talented employees are buried into everyday works that an employee with less experience can do and provide little value to the organization.

How to tap into all the talents within the organizations is a two step process. First, you need to gather the talents of the employees. In another words, you want to know who can do what better than anyone else within the company. One way to gather the information is during the annual reviews. It is common for managers write reviews only for employees' financial rewards/promotions, but what employees excelled in some areas are not leveraged and information can not be found easily nor shared across the company because of the HR policy. HR needs to extract such important information and separates it from the rest of the confidential information and enter into a centralized database that can be shared across the company.

The second steps is to place a policy company wide to use the talents within as much as possible before bringing in outside consultants who are expensive and may or may not workout in the end. In contrast, internal employees know the environment, process and business of the company. They know how to overcome the road blocks from their previous project experience. They know the internal politics and how to maneuver around the potential, but critically important requirements. For example, security requirements can kill, fail, or delay a project if they were not taken into considerations. All these knowledge can not be learned in a short period of time for the outside consultants.