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General description and main idea

ABC is a cloud consulting part of IBM Business Consulting division. ABC provides consultancy on marketing, promotion, business strategy, and IT solutions for any of the industries IBM Russia is currently working with. The major idea of ABC is to connect Clients (Seekers) and Experts (Solvers) with cloud-based innovation management platform that ensure collaboration of seekers and solvers. We decided ABC to be a part of IBM Business Consulting, because the results of top managers interview showed us the low level of trust to such companies without strong brand and reputation, which IBM definitely has. Moreover, IBM can act as a guarantor of reliability for Experts (that they will get paid) and a guarantor of trustworthiness for Clients (that the task will be fulfilled, experts are true professionals, all the confidential information will stay confidential).

Platform

As for the platform we suggest to choose cloud platform as Innocentive has. Each expert should have personal profile with personal information, history of project he/she has participated in, rewards received. Other ideas can hardly be offered due to our lack of technical knowledge about cloud platforms of this type.

We suggest to use an enterprise innovation management system to enable organizations to rapidly engage diverse internal and external innovation communities to help them solve their most immediate and specialized problems. The platform allows organizations to easily engage the right individuals to rapidly generate creative new ideas, solve important problems, and innovate faster, more cost effectively, and with less risk.

In other words, ABC’s platform will act as a mediator between Seekers, who need to solve certain problem or would like to find out original way or idea to implement, and Solvers.

The platform can be visualized as a multi-sided platform (MSP). Multi-sided platform provides a place for performing different types of activities of functions and is playing a role of intermediary, that connects different sided that are playing a role of clients, operators, executors, and providers. In other words, the multi-sided platform should allow the direct interactions between the Seekers and Solvers via the cloud platform of IBM’s ABC.

ABC’s MSP has an architecture, as well as hardware and software components and services inside (e.g Project rooms). Moreover, the platform has rules, connected with information security, contracts with Seekers and Solvers. Also included strategic aspects, including implementation issues, the overall design of the platform, attraction of Solvers and putting the new ones in new database, and issues with monetization of the platform.

Projects

The next step after describing a platform was to provide our understanding and recommendation on classification of projects. We thought that a classification system should have considered degree of difficulty and type of project. We suggest to evaluate projects’ size and difficulty by those dimensions:



1. Size should be measured in terms of value it brings to the Client company;

2. Degree of uncertainty existing in the project;

3. Complexity of relationships between project team (IBM’s workers of cloud consulting department and the Solvers) and the Client company (the Seekers);

4. Availability of resources for completing the task;

5. The degree of technical difficulty of providing the result. For instance, the degree of specialization of skills and knowledge of Solvers needed;

6. Period for completing the task set by the Client.

It is also important to consider the project management effectiveness. In case if the contact between the Seekers and Solvers will not be well-managed, even the relatively simple projects might turn into heavy burden on all parties participating in cloud consulting. That is one of reasons why we suggest ABC to be a part of IBM, rely on its brand, resources, and expertice.

Profile of experts

As for experts, we suggest IBM to create a network of experts. Following we suggest our vision of the expert’s profile that best fit into our model:

● Professionals with at least 15 years of experience in his or her area

● Previously held management position

● Experience in fulfilling complex tasks in limited period of time

● PhD degree or international certifications (such as ACCA) is an advantage

● Fluent English is an advantage

● International working experience is an advantage

In addition to the main profile of expert, we suggest one more - a profile of an auxiliary worker, whose role is supportive to the Expert:

- PhD students

- Experience of project team work (at least 3 complex projects)

- Ability for critical thinking and reasoning

- Idea generation and creativity

- Winning at least 1 case competition in his or her area of studies is an advantage

- Publications in academic journals are an advantage

- Fluent English is an advantage

We suggest that experts give a direction to the problem solving, monitor and supervise the whole solution process, while auxiliary workers (PhD students) do the work. There are several benefits for this approach:

a) PhD students learn and apply their theoretical knowledge to practice;

b) Experts may have more room for creativity knowing that PhD students are qualified enough to do the routine work;

c) IBM has a pool of potential trustworthy workers in face of PhD students. The company can track their growth and achievements.

Next section describes our suggestions on finding experts.

Finding experts

The ways of finding experts could be the following:

● Spreading the offers to companies from IBM`s network with information about new service and invitations for experts working in these companies to become an experts;

● Collaboration with top universities` PhD students in order to attract them to become future auxiliary solvers and get into IBM’s talent pool;

● Using personal contacts of management - ex-colleagues, experts from other clients’ companies

Another way of reaching experts is to broaden the search outside Russia to other post-Soviet countries. Due to common Soviet history, culture, and education, people from Belarus and Kazakhstan speak the Russian, possess similar behavioral patterns. Moreover, after the collaps of the Soviet Union Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus went through the similar process of going from planned economy to becoming emerging markets economy, which allowed people to acquire more or less the same skills and expertise.

One important aspect is, as top managers (respondents) mentioned, they want experts to be experienced and offered platform to organize the entrant testing in order to clarify the specialization, skills and areas of expertise of an expert. In order to do it, we offer to include in expert`s registration process the following:

● Incoming experts should highlight their main areas of expertise, e.g new product development, ERP systems implementation, C# coding, etc

● Incoming experts should upload their CV in order to clarify the experience, major projects, working tasks

● Identifying the motivation of experts to be involved in the work

After experts are found and registered, they need to sign a non-disclosure contract with IBM, where they agree not to disclose any information of the projects, transmit all intellectual rights for solutions to IBM as soon as solutions are submitted to the platform, and discuss the terms and conditions of rewarding.

Role of ABC

As for ABC`s role, we decided that it would be a connector between client companies and experts with several features, which are the following:

● ABC receives a request with a problem or challenge from the client company

● ABC signs the non-disclosure agreement with the seeking company in order to increase data security, that was one of the significant concerns of top management interview results

● The internal assembly of experts collaborates with client company in order to clarify tasks` points and requirements

● Before experts receive the task or challenge, it should be formulated as clearly as possible in order to keep the seeking company anonymous

● Anonymity of the company provides the reduction of confidential information leakage risk from the experts` side

● After tasks are clarified, ABC starts search in the internal database for the appropriate experts according predefined tasks` requirements

● Search is conducted based on experts areas of expertise and existing experience in resembling projects

● ABC offers chosen experts to participate in task or challenge, and expert may agree or disagree to participate

● Experts, who agreed to participate sign basic non-disclosure agreement with seeking company. This reduces the risk of data leakage

● Bureaucracy issues decrease due to both simplicity of process and using of cloud solution

● Experts start working on task. In case of additional information about company is needed, experts contact in order to receive it, but not client company, in order to stay anonymous

One more important issue to take into account is constant feedback from client company in order to provide the appropriate level of control should take place. This is due to Russian top managers` common opinion that there should be control for consultants performance in consulting services. That is why we decided to eliminate this obstacle by implementation of constant feedback requirement into working process of experts through IBM. If company needs the current progress on project it contacts IBM and IBM asks experts to submit needed files on the web platform. Client company receives it, provides the feedback back to experts (anonymously).

Reward scheme

In this section we suggest the ways of remuneration of experts in form of monetary and nonmonetary rewards. The practice of applying those two types of rewards is applied by Innocentive. We believe that it would be more efficient to use the following rewarding scheme options:

1. Experts (i.e. professionals) always receive monetary rewards that are defined and negotiated by the Client and IBM for each project specifically.

2. For Auxiliary workers rewards should be predominantly non-monetary, because of lower skills and expertise they possess. Nevertheless, the more PhD student becomes involved in projects solution, the higher benefits he or she gets. Our vision of that is the following:
a) Initially PhD student receives nothing till he or she becomes a participant of 3 to 5 sucñessful projects depending on their complexity;

b) As soon as auxiliary worker reaches the “5 project completion limit”, he or she receives special “thank you for participation” certificate from IBM;

c) Starting from the 10th or 15th project, PhD student gets his or her share of monetary reward;

d) The more projects and tasks solved, the higher the Auxiliary’s monetary reward (maximum limit up to 25% or 30% share of total monetary reward for the project).

Simultaneously with that, IBM might start offering some non-monetary rewards of increasing value, such as a one-hour tour to IBM office in Moscow or Saint-Petersburg, participation in some trainings provided for the company employees or interns (leadership, project management, presentation skills), consulting or project managers giving recommendation to the PhD student (for at least 25 projects completed for example) and any other types of reward approved or suggested by IBM’s HR department.

This scheme is aimed at holding auxiliary’s interest in projects and tasks solving and allowing true experts enjoy higher share of monetary reward.

Above was our attempt to introduce the business model of company, that operates in“ cloud consulting” niche of crowdsourcing market. During model creation, we based our decisions on our literature review, results of an interview with Russian top managers of big companies and analysis of companies, that have similar business model and that are successfully operating. We also took into account obstacles, occurring in Russian environment and tried to eliminate them in our business model. Therefore, under these conditions we suggest our ABC`s business model will be working. Nevertheless, some risks and obstacles may occur further. Experts may not like the fact that company provides them task but not the information what is the company they exactly work with. Companies may not like the distance between them and experts. That is why we also recommend to focus on constant feedback in order to diminish these obstacles and risks. Finally, there is always a threat of imperfection of legislation.


Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1199


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