It’s Monday morning after the Super Bowl and the office is buzzing over last night’s big game – but it’s probably not all about what happened on the field between the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens. Your co-workers are more likely gathering to talk about the best and worst of the Super Bowl commercials. This year, another element caught people’s attention – crowdsourcing. From commercials to the halftime show, some major brands used crowdsourcing efforts to connect with consumers. For the halftime show, Pepsi held a contest giving fans the opportunity to have their picture featured during the performance. Other major brands including Coca Cola and Doritos also embraced this new medium of crowdsourcing by giving consumers the opportunity to create their own Super Bowl commercial or even participate in these high-profile commercials.
How could all of this crazy contest-based work have anything to do with the enterprise? Let me explain. To define crowdsourcing as a term simply means connecting with a large group of people via the internet to tap them for their knowledge, expertise, time or resources. Enterprise Crowdsourcing is taking the fundamentals of this model and creating a service consumable to the enterprise. We leverage online workers with a broad range of skills from around the globe who are paid to complete tasks that fulfill business needs. We offer this as a fully managed service providing the appropriate project management, risk mitigation, security, quality assurance and SLAs required by an enterprise. We believe this innovative model is the next generation of outsourcing.
Plus, it’s a pretty simple process to apply crowdsourcing in the enterprise. Let’s take a look at four quick steps to get you started:
Step 1: Initiation
Companies that want to take advantage of crowdsourcing platforms need to identify the tasks that would give them the most benefit at an attractive level of effort, or in other words, where is the bang for the buck? Companies need to identify tasks that fill that criterion. A client-user may have a strong sense of a problem that needs to be solved and, in conjunction with a crowdsourcing service provider, can drill down to the precise tasks that could benefit from flexible supply and output-based pricing. The user organization also needs to consult with all stakeholders who will be affected by the efficiencies crowdsourcing will bring. We refer to that review process as “initiation” because, in a sense, it introduces everyone to the possibilities and it consists of the design of a new process.
Step 2: Task Design
Crowdsourcing normally involves task redesign. The traditional way of performing tasks is, in itself, a design that is often optimized for an in-house workforce. But in a crowdsourcing model, a supplier is looking to match a task design with an appropriate worker, as well as to allocate tasks in a way that guarantees privacy and security to the client. That might mean breaking a task down in new ways so that task elements can be assigned to different workers, with much more targeted skill sets. Naturally, then, an integral part of the process is to build profiles of the types of workers the tasks need.
Step 3: Pilot
The third step is to implement the new workflow and to pilot it. The workflow consists of all steps from task creation and allocation to output delivery. Imagine you have identified one or more tasks that look like good candidates for creating benefit. The pilot will give you a low-cost way of testing your assumptions about those tasks. Pilots should include as many as possible of the roll-out conditions in order to be effective tests. That means they should include worker selection (with a limited number of people), worker on-boarding routines, quality assurance procedures, goal setting, and the usual pilot attributes such as validating or disproving assumptions. The main out of the pilot is the actual roll-out plan for implementation.
Step 4: Execution
The crowdsourcing company will now go out and scale the solution by assimilating additional workers from its own worker base and/or by recruiting a qualified crowd as appropriate. Before launch, the tasks are fully bedded into the team’s routines, including the QA aspects (an area that is referred to as adjudication in crowdsourcing).The client dashboard is finalized and tasks are released to the crowd.
There you have it – the system is underway!
Want to learn more about enterprise crowdsourcing? Check out our white paper, which was developed in collaboration with Massolution and Crowdsourcing.org and examines the growth of enterprise crowdsourcing, why it’s now emerging and the benefits it brings to companies leveraging this new model. You can access the full white paper on http://info.lionbridge.com/enterprise-crowd-sourcing-blog.html.