Crowdsourcing Case Study

                            Topic I Crowdsourcing Case Study

1. Is crowdsourcing as used by AOL a form of outsourcing? Why or why not?

Crowdsourcing allows large group of people to work for an organization, and thus decreasing the permanent staff in a company. The crowdsourcing service that AOL used is the typical form of outsourcing. In other words, crowdsourcing is a process of outsourcing a job to an undefined and large group of people, by demand (Kotlarsky & Nevo, 2014). Some ways that outsourcing differs from crowdsourcing are, in outsourcing a client firm defines their requirements, finds a supplier (who is a designated services provider) and signs an agreement. Where as in crowdsourcing, the client firm issues an open call to various intermediaries that has large database of various individuals with different talents (the crowdsourced or may be voluntary or against payment) (Guittard & Schenk, 2009). It is a form of selective outsourcing where an organization has choice in retaining certain IT capabilities and giving some work to outsiders. By breaking the job into micro tasks and assigning each task to large group of people, AOL reduced its reliance on a single supplier. It provided AOL with greater flexibility. Both crowdsourcing and outsourcing are usually practiced in order to reduce costs. In outsourcing, there may be overhead costs, different pricing structure based on number of people employed, rigid work hours but a client will have access to in-house trained workers. Crowdsourcing enjoys the benefits of 24/7 workforce, no overhead costs and output based pricing (Albert, 2013). Depending upon the activities, crowdsourcing tasks can be divided into routine, complex and creative. The work that AOL crowdsourced comes under routine, where tasks can be done cheaply but their implementation becomes an issue as the scale of work increases. It is fairly similar to the way projects are handled by an outsourced supplier except that the workers when crowdsourced are usually unknown and their skills might not be up to par (Guittard & Schenk, 2009).

2. What steps do you think Maloney might have taken to ensure that the crowdsourcing would be a success for the inventory project?

Maintaining an up to date inventory is a challenging task, as there will be transitioning of job roles for experts both outside and inside the organization (Bartolini & Vukovic, 2010). There are lots of steps that ensure the success of a crowdsourcing project. The following steps are outlined in the manner of two variations, some of them are based on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and some critical steps belong to generalized crowdsourcing model. Along with AOL a number of businesses use Turk to source thousands of micro-tasks that require human intelligence. In order for success of a micro tasked project, it depends on the low user participation costs for accepting and completing simple short tasks. Maloney should also consider the fact that the inventory projects are best suited for tasks that have a genuine instead of ambiguous answers, or else users would be able to game the system and provide nonsense answers to decrease the time spent doing tasks and increase their pay (Kittur, Chi, & Suh, 2008). In the case of AOL’s inventory, Maloney might have paid attention while selecting a crowdsourcing intermediary, as it is necessary to find a platform which has large user samples and wide range of geographical diversity (Kittur, Chi, & Suh, 2008).

The vision of a crowdsourcing strategy must be a well-defined set of goals and objectives. It is necessary that the crowd perceives the project as well intentioned and creates value. Maloney might have properly managed certain aspects of vision and strategy. In order for success, the skills and abilities of the crowd must be predetermined. These skills include nationality, communication skills and level of education. Inventorying vast video library requires proper infrastructure, as it requires access to reliable, cheap and abundant internet/mobile technologies. So, sufficient investments must have been made towards development of infrastructure that can increase crowd participation. Establishing linkages with formerly successful projects adds certain trust on the part of client. It enables knowledge transfer that helps in ease of implementation of practical crowdsourcing initiatives. Motive alignment of the crowd is the most critical factor of the model. It is extremely vital that the motives of the crowd are aligned to long term objectives of the crowdsourcing initiative as it ensures their participation (Sharma, 2010). Incentives are an important aspect in crowdsourcing, while dividing the inventory work into micro-tasks Maloney might have provided monetary incentive based on the value of each micro task. Depending upon whether the crowd is internal or external monetary incentive must be varied, since internal crowd consists of employees of crowdsourced platform & external crowd consists of members who are not employees of platform. Quality assurance is the ability to verify the accuracy of data and ensure data quality. Because of large undefined group of people and their skills, quality of contribution is a key factor. AOL’s micro-tasking data quality must be based on the massive data collection, which includes labeling of image and data. Maloney must have used common structure in order to evaluate results of these micro-tasks that include aggregation of large contributions. Governance and Legal factors includes crowd selection process, certification of originality and payment systems. In certain situations it may be profitable and productive to filter the crowd the beforehand based on certification and expertise levels.         Since the work is divided into smaller micro-tasks and there is large geographical diversity of people, payment must be made in a comfortable manner (Bartolini & Vukovic, 2010). For example, in Mechanical Turk, payments are made based on location of the crowd. If a person from United States or India is part of the crowd, he/she can transfer their earnings into a gift card, get credit and buy something from amazon or transfer the money directly into the bank account. But for an individual who doesn’t belong to both of those countries, he/she might be at a disadvantage since the only way they can spend their money is through amazon gift card. So, keeping these legal and monetary matters at mind. AOL must have diversified and compensated the crowd, thus ensuring the success of inventory project (Amazon, 2005-2015).

3. What factors should be considered when deciding whether or not to crowdsource a particular part of a business?

Despite the popularity of Crowdsourcing only 10% of large organizations use crowdsourcing to complete tasks. The decision to crowdsource or not to crowdsource has to be made before an organization chooses a crowdsourcing strategy. Since this decision is important an organization since it can waste firm’s resources. There are four different factors that need to be considered before taking decision to crowdsource or not. Environmental factors include, choices to make between internal or external crowdsourcing platforms. Because cost, availability of crowdsourcing platform can affect the development cost of a project. Since various platforms consists of diversified members, the availability of platform is suitable for a task that is valuable with respect to availability of its employees. A firm should consider the people who performs its tasks in terms of available employees and crowd members. Depending upon various tasks such as transcription and image labelling, it requires human resources that often exceed firm’s capabilities, client should consider an option. For example, for a project where large pool of 21,000 diaries that has to be transcribed, it is impossible to use internal employees for such a gigantic yet recursive project. If the knowledge required to complete these tasks falls outside the firm’s resources, it can be crowdsourced. The nature of the skill set, availability of crowd members affect the decision to crowdsource as well.