The workplace is changing. More and more tasks are becoming automated, performed by computers or machines, and this means the workforce needs to adapt. In an interview with Sudhir Chowdhary, Bhaskar Ghosh, group chief executive, Accenture Technology Services says that digital has ensured a more fluid workforce that can exploit technology to transform people, projects and the entire organisation. Excerpts:
What are the benefits expected from the recent alliance between Accenture and Applause for crowdtesting services?
As per the digital testing research that Accenture published in conjunction with analyst group PAC, recruitment of right talent was raised as an important digital testing challenge by over 80% of the survey respondents. We want to be ahead of the curve with niche digital skills, and offer capacity anywhere, anytime to deliver digital testing services for our client’s websites, mobile apps or IoT products as needed.
The Applause crowd community features over 240,000 experienced quality assurance testers around the world. They complement Accenture’s 35,000 testing professionals to provide an unmatched scope of testing services and geographic coverage. We see several benefits in this alliance; the most important being benefits such as dynamic capacity, access to niche skills (including specialised crowds, such as crowds of women testers), expanded geographic coverage, and faster time-to-market.
How does crowdsourcing change business dynamics in the IT services industry?
We see three forms of crowdsourcing that are very relevant for IT organisations to explore. The first is crowdcoding, where large tasks are broken down into sets of micro-tasks and farmed out to individuals to work on. The second is crowdwisdom which leverages the crowd for ideation and innovation, and can be very useful to better understand customer expectations and preferences.
The third form is crowdtesting, which uses freelancers to test software in
real-world environments, especially digital and mobile applications. Crowdtesting is the most mature form among these, and is changing the way testing is done in technology, as it allows organisations to more easily onboard testers with specialised skills, user characteristics or geographic locations.
How do you see crowdtesting and crowdsourcing evolving globally and in India?
Enterprises which were buying technology all these years have largely been supporting business applications, but now with every business becoming a digital business, the CIO needs to design and deliver technology to address these millions of users. In this scenario, the enterprise’s end-users are spread around the world and are heterogeneous in characteristics, behaviour and needs. The ability to manage this diverse and spread-out end-user segment needs a differentiated talent pool—one that is also diverse and spread-out.
Enterprises looking to innovate and drive more value for their customers will adopt a “liquid” workforce to gain
significant advantages of digital skills, burst capacity and expanded geographic coverage. The shift from a world of static, fixed teams of resources to a “liquid” workforce will gain strategic importance, and crowdsourcing and crowdtesting will be an intrinsic part of this.
