Last week, Jennifer Cheung, director of knowledge management at Cisco, presented on an APQC webinar. She discussed how Cisco utilized crowdsourcing to harness the collective IQ, identify experts, and increase its competitive intensity.
Cisco has many fierce competitors and is working with a constantly changing landscape, which requires the organization to look for sustainable strategy and execution. With this in mind, Cheung discussed what Cisco did to stay ahead of its competition. Cisco’s field sales group wanted to know how it was beating the competition and what the “win” stories were. Cisco would collect these stories by going out and asking a large number of people how the organization was competing and winning. A technical writer would interview someone in the field leadership chain about the “win” stories. The technical writer would then write up the information collected during the interview, and the information would be distributed. There were usually only one to two stories each quarter. Cisco decided to use crowdsourcing to help it capture more stories across the organization, and thus Cisco created a competitive wins program called Cisco Barbarians.
The Cisco Barbarians program was designed to reward the best competitive wins across the organization. The program involves an open nomination where anyone at Cisco can participate by submitting a “win” tin the Barbarians Territory. The Barbarians Territory is an online portal that collects all the wins from the nominations. Field leadership then reviews and chooses their top “win” by theater. This presents an opportunity for field leadership to define top competitive behaviors they want to reward. After field leadership chooses their top “win, the final nominees are loaded back into the Barbarians Territory and everyone at Cisco votes on their favorite “win” by geographic region. The incentive for receiving the Barbarian Award is a $10,000 USD cash prize, team pride, global recognition, and a furry barbarian helmet. As a result of this program, Cisco has been able to grow brand awareness and field excitement, promote action-to-sales enablement, and increase its number of wins from one or two a quarter to more than 100 wins a quarter. The program has also allowed Cisco to innovate social platforms to help pioneer crowdsourcing efforts within the company, utilize crowdsourcing for rewards and recognition, gain efficiencies and investment leverage, as well as enhance global collaboration.
Does your organization use crowdsourcing? If so, how has crowdsourcing helped your organization stay ahead of its competition?