Crowdsourcing vs outsourcing: Martha Crow

GS: What are the imperatives for the success of crowdsourcing?

MC: Crowdsourcing marks a fundamental shift in the approach to accomplishing tasks. Disruptive by nature, it delivers improved flexibility, operational efficiencies and significant cost-savings for businesses willing to deviate from current structures and processes because it fundamentally is changing the way work gets done. The three most critical decisions when launching a crowdsourcing project are picking the right work that can be delivered through a crowd, designing an efficient task workflow, and picking the appropriate "crowd" of workers. It's necessary to think radically in deconstructing how work is currently being done so that it can be executed by the crowd, through an online platform. At Lionbridge, we utilize a collaborative four- step methodology to ensure clients can create a seamless experience and get the project going quickly and efficiently. During this quick start process, we work with clients to review requirements and analyze the options available to integrate their tasks with Lionbridge's secure cloud-based platform. The end result is a task which was completed quicker, more affordably, and at a higher quality than a traditional workforce allows.

GS: How are enterprises effectively utilizing crowdsourcing?

MC: Lionbridge has been involved in crowdsourcing since before it was coined as a term. For nearly 11 years, we've been providing crowdsourcing support to our clients, initially as part of "out of the box" in-country testing for the customer's hardware and software-related products in more than 70 countries around the world. For the last seven years, we've had a dedicated business unit focused on crowdsourcing that generates more than $150 million in revenue annually.
Our experience is that crowdsourcing is proving most useful for knowledge-based tasks rather than micro tasks; tasks that are better suited for humans to perform vs. a technology solution. These could include tasks that can't be fully automated because there are too many exceptions to the rules such as data cleansing or areas where technology has not developed enough for complete automation, such as transcription, or image and content moderation. Other areas where enterprises are adopting crowdsourcing are tasks that require user experience feedback and last mile testing or judgment ratings such as search relevancy, translation or verification.

GS: What are the advantages to crowdsourcing vs. outsourcing?

MC:There are several distinct advantages to crowdsourcing versus traditional outsourcing. They include: Global Access - As companies expand their global reach, work is increasingly dependent on having geographical or linguistic expertise. For example, as new devices and applications continue to rapidly evolve, product managers must quickly determine if the latest mobile app or the newest tablet device works globally and what the experience is like for the user in-country. The logistics of testing these devices and applications in specific worldwide locations and in local languages is impossible to achieve in a standard outsourcing model with employees working from center locations.

24×7 Availability - Enterprise crowdsourcing delivers constant access to global, qualified workers that have a higher education degree. Our crowd includes stay-at-home moms, retirees and recent grads looking for flexibility in their schedule and supplemental or secondary income.
Flexible Workforce - Workloads for businesses are often cyclical and can fluctuate seasonally or increase based upon customer demands. During tax season, ECS can provide government and state agencies a crowd to effectively process an abundance of data while offering flexibility to manage this temporary workforce.

Output Based Pricing - Elasticity is critical to meeting changing workload demands. Businesses want to pay for work returned, not per employee as reducing costs remains a key goal.

 

No Overhead Costs - Costs are further reduced because, unlike traditional outsourcing models, a location does not need to be established, costly real estate leases are eliminated and the time-consuming and costly training and onboarding of new staff is avoided.

First published in Global Services