Links between crowd funding and Islamic finance?

The idea of Crowdsourcing sometimes sits uneasily with the general sourcing literature. The sourcing literature seems to focus on inter-organisational and/or intra-organisational relationships, market-style arrangements for containing specialised value-added links in a production chain, and ultimately the commodification of work. Crowdsourcing in contrast focuses on mutuality, creativity, on unlocking the potential of dispersed though like-minded individuals to address needs that they agree on. Crowdsourcing is, perhaps, more like Islamic finance than Sourcing or Outsourcing in general.

Another way of interpreting, or adapting the Crowdsourcing concept is the idea of Islamic finance. Yomken (yomken.com) is a crowdfunding platform for financing projects and business ventures. They employ a crowdsourcing model utilising social networks as communities for gathering funds for new projects and solve problems. The net result is to release capital to entrepreneurs, and generate value while adhering to the founding principles of Islamic finance.

The underlying concepts of Crowdsourcing seem to reflect the principles of Islamic finance which, simply put, does not allow interest to be charged for loans. Similarly, betting on the result of a race, speculating on interest rates, hedging contracts and other instruments usually associated with the conventional global finance industry are disallowed. That doesn't mean that Islamic law eschews involvement in finance, raising speculative capital, or realising returns on investments. Instead Islamic finance treats ventures as joint endeavours or partnerships. For example, if you need to raise money to buy a house, you and the bank become joint partners in a contract to buy the house; you both contribute funds while you agree to pay the banks share plus a pre-agreed fee, not interest. A consequence is that it impossible to collatorise these kinds of joint-endeavour contacts. One line of thinking suggests that Sharia or Halal finance could be used as a principle based remedy to avoid collapses in financial markets like the sub-prime lending crisis that spread from the US in 2008.

In conclusion, Crowdsourcing is built on the ideas of community, of shared interests that capitalises on the potential of social network services to enable nascent communities to coalesce and persist in spite of the spatial-temporal isolation of the individuals who join them.

Contradictions in the High Tech Economy...

Observations from the recent article in The Register (www.theregister.co.uk)
Regarding the recent Corporate IT Forum Report, stating that:

"a quarter of businesses believe the biggest bar to developing future IT leaders is “too few opportunities to gain experience due to outsourcing to other economies”. A larger proportion, 27 per cent, said outsourcing to other economies needs to be tackled to address the skills gap, while a third say it's the university courses that need to change to plug that gap."

yet...

"17 per cent of university-leavers were unable to find jobs in 2011. This is a market in which the demand for qualified IT staff has increased by 23 per cent since 2010, and bosses at 59 per cent of ICT-dependent businesses said their firms are experiencing an IT skills shortage."

Why?

"...57 per cent of companies complained of a shortfall in technical abilities, while 26 per cent said it’s business skills that jobseekers are lacking. Executives are struggling to fill the following roles: enterprise architects, product-specific jobs, solutions architects, application development and security."

Humour: Outsourcing a core business process...

The risks of outsourcing a core business process.

(humour): Impact of BPO

Seriously though, if the organisation hasn't solved it's internal business processes how can it expect the outsourced business process to be any better when serviced from a remote location or automation?

Crowdsourcing news

The incredibly successful Pebble project organised through Kickstarter has reached two important milestones! Shipping the physical units and getting the complementary Apps into the Apple App Store and Google Play. (link).

In other news, consider the implications for new kinds of user generated data in services such as ESRI's Health Information Map (link).

And Crowdsourcing.org is currently running an industry survey of the crowdfunding phenomenon (link).

Exercise: What is Crowdsourcing?

Goal
Come up with a working definition of crowdsourcing.

Comments
Can be run in groups or as class exercise with someone writing up definitions and examples on blackboard. There are no wrong answers, just build up a list, tabulate and provide back to the class

Instructions
1. Ask members of the class to brainstorm the meaning of crowdsourcing. (3 minutes)
2. Write down and display this list of definitions and examples.

Definitions
Quotes below from (Howe, 2008).

"Crowdsourcing isn't a single strategy. It's an umbrella term for a highly varied group of approaches that share one obvious attribute in common: they all depend on some contribution from the crowd."

"A community that forms around a shared interest, shared passion, hobby, craft"
"When a company takes something that was once performed by employees and outsources in the form of an open call to a large group of undefined group of people, generally using the internet"

"Crowdsourcing is Wikipedia with 'everything'"

...
...

Examples
...
...
...
...

References:

• Howe, J. (2008) Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business.
• Crowd-sourced gamers advance AIDS research (link) By Ben Coxworth, 16:45 September 20, 2011

Background Readings

Books on Offshoring and Outsourcing:

Oshri, I. (2011). Offshoring Strategies: Evolving Captive Center Models (MIT Press)
Oshri, I., Kotlarsky, J. & Willcocks, L. P. (2009) The Handbook of Global Outsourcing and Offshoring, Palgrave Macmillan.
Carmel, E. and P. Tija (2005). Offshoring Information Technology: Sourcing and Outsourcing to a Global Workforce. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Lacity, M. C. and L. P. Willcocks (2001). Global Information Technology Outsourcing. Chichester, Wiley & Sons.
Sahay, S., B. Nicholson, et al. (2003). Global IT Outsourcing: Software Development Across Borders. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Trauth, E.M.(2000). The Culture of an Information Economy: Influences and Impacts in the Republic of Ireland, Dordrecht, Netherlands, Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Academic Articles on Offshoring and Outsourcing:

• Lewin, A. Y. & Peeters, C. (2006) Offshoring work: Business hype or the onset of fundamental transformation? Long Range Planning, 39, 221-239.
• Willcocks, L., Lacity, M. & Cullen, S. (2007) Information Technology Sourcing Research: Critique, Lessons and Prospects. Americas' Conference on Information Systems 2007. Keystone, Colorado, Paper 359.
• O'Riain S. (1997). "The Birth of a Celtic Tiger" Communications of the ACM, 40(3): 11-16.
• Carme, E. & Abbott, P. (2007) Why "Nearshore" Means that Distance Matters. Communications of the ACM, 50, 40-46.
• Levina, N. & Ross, J. W. (2003) From the Vendor's Perspective: Exploring the Value Proposition in Information Technology Outsourcing. MIS Quarterly, 27, 331-364.
• Feeny, D., Lacity, M. & Willcocks, L. P. (2005) Taking the Measure of Outsourcing Providers. Sloan Management Review, 46, 41-48.
• Kelly, S. & Noonan, C. (2008) Anxiety and psychological security in offshoring relationships: the role and development of trust as emotional commitment. Journal of Information Technology, 23, 232–248.
• Cullen, S., Seddon, P. & Willcocks, L. P. (2005) Managing Outsourcing: The Life Cycle Imperative. MIS Quarterly Executive, 4, 229-246.
• Lacity, M. C., Willcocks, L. P. & Rottman, J. W. (2008) Global outsourcing of back office services: lessons, trends, and enduring challenges. Strategic Outsourcing, 1, 13-34.
• Walsham, G. (2002) Cross-Cultural Software Production and Use: A structurational Analysis. MIS Quarterly, 26, 359-380.
• Oshri, I., Kotlarsky, J. & Willcocks, L. P. (2007) Managing Dispersed Expertise in IT Offshore Outsourcing: Lessons from Tata Consultancy Services. MIS Quarterly Executive, 6.
• Ågerfalk, P. R. J. & Fitzgerald, B. (2008) Outsourcing to an Unknown Workforce: Exploring opensourcing as a global sourcing strategy. MIS Quarterly, 32, 385-409.
• Gefen, D. & Carmel, E. (2008) Is the World Really Flat? A Look at Offshoring at an Online Programming Marketplace. MIS Quarterly, 32, 367-384.

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Supplimentary Readings

• Dibbern, J., T. Goles, et al. (2004). "Information systems outsourcing: a survey and analysis of the literature." Communications of the ACM, SIGMIS, 35(4): 6-102.
• Rao, M. T. (2004). "Key issues for global IT sourcing: country and individual factors." Information Systems Management 21(3): 16-21.
• Lee, J., M. Q. Huynh, et al. (2003). "IT outsourcing evolution? past, present, and future." Communications of the ACM 46(5): 84-89.
• Loh, L. and Venkatraman, N. (1992). "Diffusion of Information Technology Outsourcing: Influence Sources and the Kodak Effect." Information Systems Research 3(4): 334-358.
• Applegate, L. M., and Montealegre, R.(1991). "Eastman Kodak: Managing Information Systems Through Strategic Alliances." Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, Case 9-192-030.
• Lacity, M.C. and Hirshheim, R. (1993). "The Information Systems Outsourcing Bandwagon." Sloan Management Review 35(1): 73-86.
• Willcocks, L. and Choi C.J. (1995) "Cooperative partnership and 'total' IT Outsourcing: from contractual obligation to strategic alliance." European Management Journal 13(1): 67-78.
• Willcocks, L.P. and Kern, T. (1998) "IT outsourcing as strategic partnering: the case of the UK Inland Revenue." European Journal of Information Systems 7: 29-45.
• Heeks, R. and Nicholson, B. (2004). "Software export success factors and strategies in 'follower' nations". Competition and Change 8(3): 267-303.
• Heeks R. (1999) "Software strategies in developing countries" Communications of the ACM 42(6): 15-20.
• Willcocks, L. &; Choi, C. (1995). "Coopreative partnership and 'total' outsourcing: from contractual obligation to strategic alliance?" European Management Journal, 13(1): 67-78.
• Carmel, E. (2006) "Building your Information Systems from the Other Side of the World: How Infosys manages time differences." MIS Quarterly - Executive 5(1): 43-53.
• Carmel, E. and Agarwal, R. (2001) "Tactical approaches for alleviating distance in global software development". IEEE Software, 18(2): 22-29.
• Kumar K. and Willcocks L. (1996) "Offshore outsourcing: a country too far?" Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Information Systems, Lisbon, Portugal, July 2-4, pp. 1309-1325.
• Krishna, S., Sahay, S. and Walsham G. (2004) "Managing cross-cultural issues." Communications of the ACM 47(4): 62-66.
• Nicholson, B. and Sahay, S. (2004) "Embedded knowledge and offshore software development." Information and Organisation 14(2004): 329-365.
• Handy C. (1995) "Trust and the virtual organization" Harvard Business Review, 73(3): 40-50.
• van Welsum, D., and Vickery, G. (2004) "Potential Offshoring of ICT-Intensive Using Occupations", DSTI/ICCP/IE(2004)19/FINAL, OECD, Paris, 2005
• van Welsum, D., and Vickery, G. (2004b) "New Perspectives on ICT Skills and Employment," DSTI/ICCP/IE(2004)10FINAL, OECD, Paris, 2005
• Hirschheim, R., Loebbecke, C., Newman, M. and Valor J. (2005). "Offshoring and Its Implications for the Information Systems Discipline." Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Information Systems, Las Vegas, Nevada, pp. 1003-1018.
• Davis, G., Ein-Dor, P., King, W., and Torkzadeh, R. "IT Offshoring: History, Prospects and Challenges." Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Information Systems, R. Agarwal, L. Kirsch, and J. I. DeGross (Eds.), Washington, DC, December 2004, pp. 1027-1038.
• Stack, M. and Downing, R. "Another look at Offshoring. Which jobs are at risk and why?" Business Horizons 48(6): 513-523.
• Soliman, K.S., Chen, L. and Frolick, M. N. (2003) "ASP's: do they work?" Information Systems Management, 20(4): 50-57.
• Hirschheim R. and Lacity M. (2000) "The Myths and Realities of Information Technology Insourcing." Communications of the ACM, 43(2): 99-107.
• NeoIT (2005) "Research Summary: Mapping Offshore Markets Update 2005." Offshore Insights Market Report Series 3(8)
• Carmel, E. and Abbott, P. (2006) "Configurations of Global Software Development: Offshore versus Nearshore". In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Global Software Development for the Practitioner (GSD '06). 20-28 May, Shanghai, China.

Exercise: Sourcing Concepts - Word Association

Sourcing Concepts - Word Association

What is sourcing?

Consider the following words and concepts associated with sourcing activities and outsourcing industry:

Outsourcing & Economic Development
Managing Distance/Time
Managing Cross-cultural Issues
Managing Knowledge Transfer
The Politics of Outsourcing
Sourcing Models
Offshoring
Offshore Outsourcing
Near Shoring
Crowd Sourcing
Open Source
Captive Centres
Supplier/Customer/Client
Life Cycle
Multi-Sourcing
Service Providers
Cloud Sourcing
In-Sourcing
Trust
Commodity
Capability
Communication
ASP's (Application Service Providers)
Backsourcing (insourcing)
BPO & Nearshoring
Sea sourcing
Farm sourcing

Outsourcing Modes: Deciding: Interrelated: Managing the Relationship: Outsourcing and Economic Development: Managing Distance and Time: Managing Across Cultures: Managing Knowledge Transfer: The Politics of Outsourcing: Outsourcing and Offshoring Trends.