Enhancing quality of it services delivery using enterprise crowdsourcing

Abstract

IT outsourcing companies have adopted global delivery model, where IT services, such as backup management, are supplied out of multiple locations worldwide, based on the skill and cost of IT delivery staff, such as system administrators (SAs) and call center agents. Managing IT services quality requires insights obtained by extracting large volumes of tacit knowledge about processes, products and people, which is in collective possession of experts. Current practices to discovering this distributed and unstructured knowledge are semi-automated. Often they involve manual data collection using spreadsheets and tracking of exerts through e-mail. As such they fail to scale and provide accurate insights on demand, such as IT infrastructure snapshots. We present an enterprise crowdsourcing service that enables harnessing of human knowledge to derive quality insights in IT services. Our approach automates knowledge and knowledge owner discovery, and is based on the concept of distributed questionnaires. Experts can breakdown the knowledge requests into multiple parts and engage their networks to co-create the content. We discuss the effectiveness of our approach for knowledge discovery in the context of large-scale, on-going business activities in IT outsourcing organization, which collectively engaged over 2500 experts globally. © World Scientific Publishing Company.