Challenges and experiences in deploying enterprise crowdsourcing service

Abstract

The value of crowdsourcing, arising from an instant access to a scalable expert network on-line, has been demonstrated by many success stories, such as GoldCorp, Netflix, and TopCoder. For enterprises, crowdsourcing promises significant cost-savings, quicker task completion times, and formation of expert communities (both within and outside the enterprise). Many aspects of the vision of enterprise crowdsourcing are under vigorous refinement. The reasons for this lack of progress, beyond the isolated and purpose-specific crowdsourcing efforts, are manifold. In this paper, we present our experience in deploying an enterprise crowdsourcing service in the IT Inventory Management domain. We focus on the technical and sociological challenges of creating enterprise crowdsourcing service that are general-purpose, and that extend beyond mere specific-purpose, run-once prototypes. Such systems are deployed to the extent that they become an integrated part of business processes. Only when such degree of integration is achieved, the enteprises can fully adopt crowdsourcing and reap its benefits. We discuss the challenges in creating and deploying the enterprise crowdsourcing platform, and articulate current technical, governance and sociological issues towards defining a research agenda. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.