In an environment that continues to rapidly change, contingent workers—individuals who are not on company payroll but provide services to an organization (e.g., contractors, consultants, temps, advisers like attorneys, and subcontractors that supply workers)—have become a key resource in helping companies achieve their strategic business goals and objectives. Whether contingent workers are brought in to fill a skills gap, provide temporary coverage for employees on leave, or meet cost and time considerations, they serve an increasingly essential role for organizations. The trend toward larger contingent workforces—increasingly constituting 30%–50% of an overall workforce1—is creating new challenges for leaders looking to improve or streamline their workforce management. For the past four years, MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte have researched the , conducting global surveys and interviews with executives and other thought leaders. Our most recent research reveals the need for an integrated approach to managing contingent workers as an important aspect of orchestrating an overall workforce ecosystem consisting of contingent workers, employees, gig workers, crowdsourced contributors, app developers, and even certain technologies., Cisco’s efforts to implement a contingent workforce strategy are still in process, but they have introduced several initiatives in key areas that are worth highlighting as useful practices for orchestrating not only contingent worker management but also workforce ecosystems as a whole. Cross-functional steering committee, Only in the last few years have vendors such as WorkMarket (just acquired by ADP) and Fieldglass (acquired by SAP in 2014), as well as startups such as RallyTeam, Fuel50, and others, started to offer contingent, gig, and project management tools to help companies manage and communicate with the broader workforce ecosystem. 6 In most cases, once .