www.passbrains.com

Passbrains CrowdConsult: The Intelligent Knowledge Networking Tool

On 14. November 2013, our technology partner, Starmind International won this year’s Swiss ICT Award in the category “Newcomer” and has been honored as runner-up for the Public Award 2013. The Swiss ICT Award promotes entrepreneurship and the acceptance of ICT entrepreneurs and companies in Swiss society where “Newcomer” category represents younger Swiss ICT companies that are likely to play a significant role in the future with innovative solutions. Starmind develops self-learning know-how networks for companies that operate in knowledge industries. Starmind’s solution facilitates structured knowledge management and talent identification in real time and is based on advanced self-learning algorithms derived from the principles of artificial intelligence and neural networks.

The Passbrains Crowd Testing Platform uses Starmind’s technology for community-based structure and scalable knowledge networking because we believe that in a community setting, “the basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge.”, as asserted by Peter Drucker, Management Guru.

Today, managers are constantly dreaming about the day when they could progressively capture the know-how and experience distributed among their employees and leverage this collective know-how as a source of competitive advantage. In the words of Etienne Wenger, co-creator of the concept of Communities of Practice, “Knowledge management will never work until corporations realize it’s not about how you capture knowledge but how you create and leverage it.” With crowd testing, the situation is no different, as in large crowd communities it all comes down to efficient access to specialized knowledge on-demand.

The challenge

Knowledge management, as it is currently practiced in most organizations, revolves around documenting the best practices in Wikis, blogs, etc. This approach, however, does not appear to be the answer, especially in multi-stakeholder situations as with crowd testing initiatives, which require deep subject matter expertise, extensive know-how and attention to intricate details.

Scenarios as with crowd testing are usually complex by nature and mandate deep technical know-how. In these scenarios, execution is tightly coupled with experience and expertise. In such cases, attempts to archive knowledge using document management systems are almost always incomplete and are immediately outdated; traditional knowledge management approaches are only rarely successful and almost unusable in such contexts.

Furthermore, the community size is a challenge in aggregating and managing the knowledge dispersed across the community’s members.

www.passbrains.com

The bigger a community grows, the more challenging it gets to keep tabs on the community’s expertise. Connecting, channeling and bridging expertise from where it is the most wanted to where it is the most available requires support of advanced tools and smart machines built using artificial intelligence concepts, ingenious portfolio of algorithms and distributed datasets to approach such complex topics systematically over a structured framework.

How do we do it?At Passbrains, technology lies at the core of our community knowledge. Our technology solution from Starmind captures the expertise distributed across our community of several thousand professional testers, charts the knowledge automatically and generates knowledge maps that visually identify where specific talents reside within the community. Much like an infant’s brain, our community knowledge builds on itself automatically with every new project, with every new task and with each professional that joins our community. Through such a conscious and systematic approach to knowledge management, our platform has become extremely adept and agile at problem solving and extremely accurate at localizing experts.

Our solutionPassbrains CrowdConsult – our knowledge management tool for customers is part of our larger Passbrains platform suite. This functionality continuously and systematically maps Passbrains’ community knowledge to help customers quickly identify Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for speedy problem solving, consulting engagements or expert recruitment. CrowdConsult’s self-learning knowledge networking engine maps questions, problems and tasks and automatically routes them to competent experts amongst thousands of members in the Passbrains community.

The motivation for such a systematic knowledge management approach derives from the vision we share with Pascal Kaufmann, Starmind’s Chief Executive Officer, “We want to make knowledge accessible”. By making the collective community knowledge available to our customers, we provide many competitive advantages that our customers benefit from. The ability to find and apply the right solution immediately when needed is a core competitive asset in itself. With the CrowdConsult tools and services offering, Passbrains provides a supportive environment, where capturing the right knowledge,

www.passbrains.com

refining the collected knowledge, storing it in an effective way, categorizing the knowledge and making it easily accessible are achieved automatically and comprehensively.

How it worksPassbrains users simply enter their questions, problems or tasks; the CrowdConsult tool and expert community handles the rest. Passbrains CrowdConsult automatically identifies the Subject Matter Expert(s) most suited for the task at hand and routes the question to the individual(s), who provide answers and solutions within shortest time. Once the solutions are provided, the users can comment and rate the solutions. Aggregated solution ratings enable Passbrains users and customers to search for specific Subject Matter Experts and engage with them directly for individual problem solving tasks, consultation or freelance engagements. Hence, this functionality is also extremely helpful for staffing projects at a short notice.

BenefitsPassbrains’ CrowdConsult knowledge base can be accessed anywhere via web browsers or mobile devices. Organizations also benefit from the real-time access to best practices, knowledge and expertise. The automated process and self-learning tools seamlessly support organizations’ sourcing activities by pinpointing experts with the right skill sets that could deliver maximum benefits and results for their projects. Together with Passbrains’ enterprise solution, organizations can also onboard their internal staff and thereby leverage existing internal expertise better, reduce dependency on external resources, tremendously increase efficiency and reduce costs at the same time.

SummaryPassbrains CrowdConsult knowledge self service delivers tremendous value to customers. Ad-hoc access to a large knowledge community allows organizations to immediately leverage our expert knowledgebase curated and built over the course of several decades by contributions from thousands of IT and software testing experts globally and several decades of combined software testing experience. Through combination of private (customers’) and public (Passbrains’) crowd communites internal and external knowledge and expertise can be made accessible to customers in a seamlessly integrated form. The slim and easy-to use web interface supports regular usage on a daily basis. Searching and identifying best qualified Subject Matter Experts and talents from Passbrains’ growing community of thousands IT and software testing experts has never been easier. Companies and customers could now seamlessly leverage research and solutioning processes by using Passbrains CrowdConsult through access to thousands of brains worldwide!