Wisdom of the Crowd within enterprises: Practices and challenges

Abstract

The Wisdom of the Crowd advocates that decisions collectively made by a diverse crowd could be better than those made by an elite group of experts. The Wisdom of the Crowd puts preconditions on this to work correctly. This concerns the diversity of the crowd, their independence from each other, their decentralisation, and the methods of aggregating their distributed knowledge and forming collective decisions. Although the concept is inspiring, its interpretation and conduct differ significantly amongst enterprises, especially with regard to the culture and style of management. In addition, we still lack reflections on how the Wisdom of the Crowd worked in the practice of modern enterprises. To address this lack of knowledge, this paper conducts an empirical study following a mixed method approach involving 35 senior managers coming from 33 different industries in the UK. In the first phase we interview eight managers and, in the second, we confirm and enhance the results by a survey consisting of open-ended questions and involving 27 other managers. The results shed light on the current practice of the Wisdom of the Crowd in several UK enterprises, which can inform the analysis and design of future software tools meant to aid this emerging decision-making mechanism.