In the wake of the somewhat inevitable death of outright outsourcing, a brand new way of getting various-sized projects done is rapidly rising to prominence, in the form of crowdsourcing.
Since crowdsourcing is systemically edging out its once popular outsourcing cousin, it can be justifiably deduced that crowdsourcing is definitely better than outsourcing, but exactly how? While the likes of Yahoo are laying-off up to 400 employees in India and the outsourcing phenomenon is similarly dying out globally, the alternative and rapid adoption of crowdsourcing (or managed outsourcing) brings to light its many advantages over outsourcing such as the ultimate contributing factor to any business decision — cutting costs.
Scribie, an online audio/video transcription company’s earlier tag line was audio transcription, outsourced. “However, over the time we realized that we were actually crowdsourcing the work rather than outsourcing it and later on changed the tagline to audio transcription, perfected”, says Rajiv, the founder of Scribie.com. “Crowdsourcing one’s technical tasks naturally takes place over internationally-linked online platforms, which automatically equates to the availability of global talent. The inherently flexible workforce accessed through crowdsourcing is infinitely better than the limited, fixed one dictated to by an outsourcing structure.”, he added. “The challenge here could be ensuring the guaranteed quality which beyond doubt is most important to all our customers. The managed outsourcing helps us in achieving this immense task by having quality safe guards built into its online platform with proper check at every step in the workflow. It is cost-effective and a much better way for both large as well as small projects.”
While scribie.com example may be focused specifically on their crowdsourced Transcription service, but this online platform epitomizes the gist of crowdsourcing’s many advantages over outsourcing. The allure of not having to keep an inventory of permanent staff on their payroll equates to Human Resource gold for progressive companies like Scribie.com, whose survival and advancement relies on this freelance model with a managed outsourcing platform. This platform, which is completely online, helps in distributing the work to freelancers as well as automating the entire workflow whenever any project comes in. Everything is done on a click of mouse, from a customer uploading file and placing an order, to the distribution of work to freelancers and then to an in-house team and finally the delivery of the transcripts to customers.