Knowledge_as_a_Service (KaaS) - cumulusIQ Blog!

Long tail in SAP consulting..consultants and monetization..using cumulusIQ..

A few days ago, I posted a blog entry about the power of crowd sourcing, and why the model allows customers to find viable $1 solutions to $100 problems.

Consultants might feel ripped off by the crowd sourcing idea, because it seems to exert downward price pressure on their fees. If you charge $100 an hour to provide a service that someone else provides for $10 an hour, isn’t it game over? And shouldn’t you work as hard as possible to preserve your margins?

You’re right to be skeptical, but you’re wrong to think in terms of service. You have to think in terms of products and the long tail.

You have only 168 hours a week in which to sell your services, but there is no limit to how many products you can sell. That’s the first attraction to taking what’s in your head and turning it into a product that can be found and consumed on a marketplace. It’s all the difference between giving two lectures a week for $200 each time and selling 500 $10 books with that same lecture text on Amazon. This raises the second attraction: passive revenue. Billing for services is hard work. Collecting passive revenue from products is easy, once you’ve done the initial work of monetizing your service.

Now let us take the real example from cumulusIQ Knowledge Marketplace. Here is a sharp guy Doug TanBrock Sr. He is an excellent SAP QM consultant with years of honed in practical experience implementing SAP Quality Management. He has worked on so many SAP QM implementations that everyone wants Doug on their project. But how can he afford to be on every project, even if he want to. The rule of 168 hours restrict his available time.

So Doug took the effort in taking all his years of honed in practical consulting knowledge and turned it into a product in this 30 track SAP QM videos, that now sell on cumulusIQ for less then $2000.

This includes all QM business processes, implementation considerations, step by step walk through of all QM transactions in SAP. Normally if you are are a business implementing SAP QM transactions, you would spend close to 10 times that amount paying an SAP QM consultant to transfer that knowledge to you. In addition you have no real good way to going back and accessing this knowledge once this consultant has left your company. I would highly recommend any organization going through SAP QM implementation to buy Doug's SAP QM videos before going through SAP Training or hiring an SAP QM consultant. Going through these videos will insure you are as smart as the consultant/consulting company you hire for SAP QM implementation.

Here is the link, if you are interested in buying the entire QM consulting knowledge:

http://www.cumulusIQ/contents/search_detail/147

Think about it from the SAP perspective and you’ll see that the long tail of future opportunity is the SMB market. This is the great untapped mother lode; these are the folks to whom you want to sell your services. The problem is that this is a large and fragmented market. It isn’t the cozy insider’s world of Fortune 500 SAP implementations. They won’t post on Monster or Dice. They won’t go to recruiters. cumulusIQ is attractive to this audience because of the breadth of our services; it’s where they come to search for any and every a la carte SAP service they need. As an SAP consultant, cumulusIQ is your Amazon, and your gateway to the opportunities of the SMB market.

Take your services expertise and turn it into consumable products—programs, videos, articles—on cumulusIQ, then let the market come to you. You’ll have a new, passive revenue stream while making contacts that may lead to conventional engagements.

If you are an individual looking for SAP QM click here or a SAP Business interested in signing up with cumulusIQ..

http://www.cumulusIQ.com/signup

Crowdsourcing through Knowledge Marketplace

SAP recently decided to solicit ideas for business-friendly social networking applications from a crowdsourcing platform, Innocentive. SAP got 1,239 responses, which it is currently evaluating to find the best proposed solution. The experiment went so well that SAP submitted another idea to crowdsourcing, this time in search of a vendor-independent way to handle Web services errors, and got a viable solution by December.

When SAP debuts its next social networking functionality or Web service error-handling capability, odds are some freelance developer far from Walldorf came up with some of the code. This marks a true revolution in the evolution of service delivery, which we visualize as follows:

 

 

Insource: Use your own employee(s) to do the customization.

Outsource: Hire an outside developer or development team.

Crowdsource:  Post your need on a platform and let the crowd respond.

As you move up the pyramid, cost increases, time to value goes up, and breadth of solutions decreases.

Tasking employees to do customization and other services work is expensive. Hence, most companies outsource. Provisioning services from a partner is cheaper, since you don’t have to maintain that capacity in-house and can pay for it as needed. But outsourcing is still more expensive than many companies realize. In Jeff Howe’s The Rise of Crowdsourcing in Wired, the example is a company that needs to buy some stock photography. The first option would be for the company to do the photography itself, but insourcing would be expensive, and the company isn’t equipped for it. The second option is outsourcing, and the company finds a photographer willing to charge $100 a picture. The third option is crowdsourcing. When the company finds a stock photography platform on the Web, the cost is $1 per picture. No contest—game over.

That’s the power of crowdsourcing in a nutshell. Someone out there has a $1 solution to your $100 problem.

If you think that example doesn’t apply to SAP, think again. SAP’s own Web services error-handling challenge paid $10,000. If SAP’s own employees were tasked to create this functionality, it might well cost ten FTEs a month of labor each to come up with it, costing SAP $100,000. If SAP bought it from a professional development firm, the cost might be even more. But going to crowdsourcing reduced the sticker price on the solution by an order of magnitude. SAP is pleased enough with the quality of the solution, as it chose—from among 485 submissions—and made a reward.

If you’re in the market to buy SAP services, this should be a signal to you. If SAP is crowdsourcing development, you should crowdsource your use of SAP services. Don’t do it in-house; don’t even outsource it to a dedicated services organization, like a systems integrator or consultancy; use the power of the crowd to find what you need.

Say you go to a consultancy and ask them to customize an SAP solution for you. It’s a fairly complex customization, requiring a lot of creativity. How many consultants do you think will give thought to your problem? One? Three? Ten? How much will it cost you to retain their services? Now take a page out of SAP’s book and imagine posting your need to the crowd. SAP got 1,219 responses to their social networking tender. Do you really think SAP wanted to pay 1,219 consultants to come up with individual project ideas for social networking, or could have pulled 1,219 employees off their jobs to concentrate on this feature?

SpinAct is an SAP services crowdsourcing platform. Using the SpinAct crowd for your SAP services, training, and customization needs is designed to be cheap, quick, and broad, in terms of the number and quality of solutions you can find. Our search box replaces the black box of doing it yourself, or hiring a company to do it. Hire the crowd to do it, and reap the benefits.