How can we truly advance digitalization within organizations? – PACIS 2025
Employees, even with limited technological expertise, often know best where automation can be useful, such as replacing routine tasks. In collaboration with a leading sportswear manufacturer, we designed an internal gamified crowdsourcing contest aimed at uncovering opportunities for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) by actively engaging employees.
Our contribution to the PACIS2025 Conference highlights this project, sharing our lessons learned during the development, testing, and refinement of the approach. We observed several positive outcomes:
– Engaging a broad base of employees generated numerous actionable ideas for automation.
– We successfully reached employees without a technical background, sparking their interest in RPA technologies.
– Gamification reduced perceived barriers to using RPA, offering a compelling reason for employees to embrace the technology.
– The crowdsourcing contest lowered cognitive thresholds, allowing the organization to embed the idea of RPA’s ease of use and its value in automating business processes.
As a practical takeaway, we offer recommendations on how internal crowdsourcing contests can be utilized to foster ideation and support automation initiatives within organizations. Check the comment section for a link to the paper “How to Design an Engaging Online Crowdsourcing Contest in Organizations? Lessons from a German Sportswear Company”.
Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems 2025 kicks off tomorrow. Wishing all participants an inspiring and productive conference experience!
Thank you to the dedicated author team: Willi Tang, Sandra Zilker, Moh Ghadban, Benedikt Morschheuser