Managing crowdsourcing assignments

Crowdsourcing is not an outsourcing panacea to solve all problems, but it is a useful tool for business and IT managers to have in their toolbox. However, crowdsourcing does require some rethinking of traditional approaches to managing outsourcing activities, notably with regards to service-level agreements (SLAs), motivating participation, and generally “managing” the crowd. In this article, I address three aspects of the crowdsourcing phenomenon: how crowdsourcing works, how to manage it, and where one can use it.