The management of crowdsourcing in business processes

Organizations increasingly place value on the devolution of decision-making authority both within and beyond traditional organizational hierarchies and boundaries. The sacrifice of centralized management control is exchanged for increased engagement from staff, customer and partners and the more agile decision making and improved commitment to implementing decisions this implies. However, most existing IT service management and workflow management systems assume a centralised management model and offer very limited management support for devolved decision making. In this paper, we examine an approach to devolved decision-making in industrial workflow through the trend to crowdsource elements of the localization workflow for digital content, by leveraging the linguistic talents of online user communities which use the content or associated products.