Crowdsourcing at AOL
Enterprise Information Systems
Nova Southeastern University
February 16, 2014
Abstract America Online (AOL) recently turned to crowdsourcing to help inventory AOL’s immense video library. The large job was broken up into several micro-tasks completed by several different people. This paper will discuss what happened during the crowdsourcing project that took place at AOL.
Crowdsourcing at AOL Case Study
Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. AOL executive Daniel Maloney …show more content…
Reductions of development costs are growing and various forms of development and processes of development have been proposed and invented. Software development project members usually consist of individuals hired by a company or involved in a community such as open source project since software development requires frequent communication. If frequent communication can be saved, a number of individuals in the general public can develop same software by dividing a number of parts of software. Using the crowdsourcing system, the project was able to be completed in about a week (Pearlson & Saunders, 2013).
Crowdsourcing is becoming the “next big thing” by leading companies as they are starting to let combined intelligence form their business strategies (Horn, 2013). Crowdsourcing has a positive impact on AOL, as it not only saved on many costs, but it also was completed quickly. The only drawback was that Daniel Maloney did not know anything about the workers who did the job, and he more than likely had to double check them to make sure they were all doing their work correctly (Pearlson & Saunders,