I just returned from the SIG (Sourcing Interest Group) Summit in beautiful Amelia Island Florida where Martha Crow, SVP, and I presented. We spoke with many great companies while we were there enjoying the conference and one recurring question that seemed to come up over and over again is “What makes a good crowd project for the Enterprise?”.
That is a great question because crowdsourcing has evolved significantly to accommodate the growing demand from enterprises for more cost-efficient, flexible staffing options. While the industry started with companies crowdsourcing minor tasks, the shift over the last few years has been to tackle bigger and more complex projects that require a wide array of skills, often necessitating a workforce with a global footprint.
So, how does a manager determine whether a project is a good candidate for an enterprise crowdsourcing engagement?
Human Intelligence
Most managers’ initial inclination is likely to eliminate the HR element entirely and send it off to the semi-conductor farm to be crunched by the computers. While there have been enormous advances in data recognition and processing software, there is still a major gap between machine intelligence and the innately human ability of deduction. It’s this deductive reason that allows a person to make the subjective decisions that go into product testing, rating content relevancy, or summarizing content. Therefore, the first major qualifier for a project’s potential for a crowdsourcing solution is the actual need for human input. Humans are also needed to accurately transcribe audio while accounting for regional dialects, slang, etc. One of the unique attributes of the crowd is its borderless footprint, which enables a crowd provider to reach into a global pool of workers to identify those with the very specific regional and local language knowledge necessary for such projects.
Volume and Fluctuation
The next consideration is the sheer volume of tasks and the fluctuation in that work. For the most part, projects with large volumes of tasks/data/work are usually the best projects for a crowd as they can be done, better, faster and cheaper with a crowd. Additionally, one of the key benefits of crowdsouring is its “elasticity” – the ability to ramp the workforce up and down quickly and efficiently. In any project, workloads are going to ebb and flow throughout and crowdsourcing’s output-based pricing structure will prevent a company from being saddled with hundreds or thousands of FTEs twiddling their collective thumbs when workloads temporarily wane. While there is some ramp up time associated with upsizing the crowd demanded for a project, the crowdsourcing model will accommodate both the high level of human-required tasks and the potential ebb and flow of that workload.
A perfect example of this ebb and flow is data entry associated with seasonal tax processing. To overcome that staffing demand, the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue tapped into our Enterprise Crowdsourcing platform to handle the irregular surge. Besides the savings on full time staff costs, personnel training, etc., the PA DOR was able to cut costs, improve data accuracy, and increase processing turnaround times by 70 percent!
Work Type
The final criteria for a “crowd-worthy” project comes down to whether the component jobs within the overall project can be redesigned to be handled by the crowd, and are essentially repeatable. Because most jobs are created with a full-time staffer in mind, they often need to be broken down and rebuilt to function within the crowd. Each task is also infinitely repeatable so once the task is designed the crowd can be scaled to meet the demand for that specific job activity. In the above example of the PA DOR, we were able to use our proprietary crowd platform and our vcapture Snippet technology to divide each tax form into unidentifiable components (protecting personal data) to be processed by a private crowd of workers located within Pennsylvania to keep the work local. With the data appropriately compartmentalized, we could easily ramp up the works to support that flow of data as tax season reached its spring crescendo.
With these basic guidelines, enterprise-level project managers should be able to make an initial diagnosis of their projects to determine whether crowdsourcing can help them execute a more cost-effective solution. If you’re reading this thinking you might have a project in mind, reach out to me, Dori Albert, at Dori.Albert@lionbridge.com to see if we can ultimately give you a bigger and better bang for your buck. If your interest is only piqued, you can always take a look at our enterprise crowdsourcing primer, or a this white paper that provides some great examples of enterprises using the crowd.
