Presentation 3. Governance in enterprise crowdsourcing

Some posit that crowdsourcing will disrupt labor markets within a decade. Therefore we need to understand how to manage this innovation. Our study is focused on large organizations - the enterprises - that buy these crowdsourcing services. Such large organizations can also be government organizations. What is crowdsourcing? It is a messy umbrella term that has become all things to all people. Specifically, our focus is on paid crowdsourcing: hire the testers through the cloud from uTest; hire coders through the cloud from Topcoder; hire the corporate graphic designer through the cloud from freelancer.com or 99designs.com; for the massive digitation project, hire microtaskers at mobileworker.com. The governance issues are similar to generic sourcing governance. However, there are some special dimensions that may be more acute for crowdsourcing. I will focus on five dimensions of interest: quality, risks in IP and privacy, risks in project control, risks in organizational reputation because of exploitation, and management of the crowd itself. A significant number of U.S. enterprises are dabbling in crowdsourcing - some of them spending in excess of one million USD. But these projects are still small, scattered, occasionally skunk-works. And the enterprise managers who pioneer crowdsourcing have few peer networks and no benchmarking.