As the information industry continues to evolve, we at IEI are convinced that crowdsourced updating will play an ever larger role in its underlying foundation. No longer will databases languish waiting for periodic updates. Rather, they will be constantly updated via a combination of user feedback, event-driven triggers, and crowdsourced revisions overseen by professional editors.
We manage our customers’ crowdsourcing projects via the WorkFusion platform – enterprise software that allows us to handle hundreds of thousands of tasks per month (1). It helps us keep complete control over multiple concurrent projects, diverse workforces, and the quality of the data produced.
We chose WorkFusion over its competitors for a few key reasons. It handles the same core tasks as other platforms (2) and has robust process design tools. It was created with private crowds and blended crowds in mind (3). It includes a repository of automated routines (“machines”) that we can insert at the beginning, middle and end of complex processes. In short, WorkFusion-powered processes allow projects to scale up and down quickly with consistently high-quality output.
Managing crowdsourcing projects requires intimate knowledge of the platform and mastery of several process design and management tasks (4). IEI’s project managers have decades of experience handling complex publishing processes professionally, and we’ve been using WorkFusion for three years now. This experience ensures that we manage data processes better than firms that are new to data management or that have reluctantly grafted project management services onto their software businesses.
Our experience also means that we don’t set unrealistic customer expectations on the cost savings possible via crowdsourcing. This approach is not just or even primarily about saving money on labor. It is about speed, scale, quality, and consistency.
Finally, WorkFusion’s focus is on building the most robust project management tool possible. Leaving the actual project design and management of crowdsourced processes to its customers (and specialists like IEI) means that it will continue to push the limits on what crowdsourcing can achieve. This allows its customers to reap the “better, cheaper, faster” benefits of a world where labor is flexible and data processes can be automated and managed to a degree that was unthinkable only a few short years ago.
