Cloudfactory
The Rockefeller Foundation defines Impact Sourcing as a socially responsible arm of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry that intentionally employs people who have limited opportunity for employment - often in low-income areas.
At CloudFactory, we like to take that definition one step further by investing in our workforce and emphasizing personal development that brings hope to families and communities. We don't view Impact Sourcing as simply a strategy or just the latest fad in sustainable development initiatives. Instead, the goal of positively impacting the lives of workers and their families drives every facet of our business. Because of this focus we see our cloud workers work hard to bring tangible impact to our clients through amazing work, and all of this is a virtuous cycle that grows our business.
Changing the Way the World Works
Someone once told me that, "Geeks will change the world!". So what would happen if a bunch of geeks moved their families to a third world country and did a tech startup to fight poverty and change the world?
Ten years ago the first family came for a two week vacation to Nepal and ended up staying because they fell in love with a beautiful country and beautiful people. Since then, others have moved themselves and their families to join a new type of company. One that cares more about social impact than profit. But a company also wise enough to know that profit is what deepens our social impact over the long term.
The ideas come out of our years working with web applications, mobile apps, big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, gamification, data entry & processing, transcription, outsourcing, crowdsourcing and more (remember ... we are geeks!). But it all boils down to using technology to flatten the world, connect people into the global economy and raise up leaders to fight poverty and change their communities. We are changing the way the world works.
Traditional Assembly Lines
We think the outsourcing model is inefficient and broken. Our inspiration in solving this problem comes from Henry Ford introducing the assembly line to the world 100 years ago and the resulting disruption of the entire manufacturing industry. Entire nations were transformed by the advent of the assembly line and mass production was at the foundation of this revolution.
Instead of ten mechanical engineers completely building one car at a time, Ford broke the process down in to 84 steps and had lower-skilled workers specialize in each of those steps to produce the same car along an assembly line. This assembly line approach produced higher quality cars at a faster rate while decreasing the price for customers and increasing the money his employees took home at the end of the day. But what does this look like in the information economy?
Virtual Production Lines
It isn't just the process of building a car that can be broken down into a production line design. Almost every organization has business processes that can be solved with the same approach. CloudFactory uses a combination of the latest technology and an on-demand, global workforce to bring production lines into the realm of digital work. Tedious back office work can now be completed faster, cheaper and to a higher accuracy thanks to CloudFactory.
