Service Assurance Framework for Enterprise Task Crowdsourcing

Crowd sourcing platforms enable enterprise requesters to leverage the online workforce to process voluminous enterprise tasks on a regular basis. Web services provided by these platforms facilitate requesters to post tasks, retrieve results and incentivize crowd workers. However, service assurance associated with task execution by crowd workers is not provided by these platforms. Owing to the flexible, uncommitted, discretionary working patterns of online crowd workers, service assurance for task execution is considered to be beyond the service assurance offerings of existing crowd sourcing platforms. Enterprises however, require these guarantees to be able to adopt crowd sourcing in a profound manner. In this paper, we propose a Service Assurance Framework as a crowd sourcing platform augmenting service, that provides service assurance for task execution by crowd workers. The framework helps enterprise requesters to identify and engage with workers who possess suitable service assurance attributes. To the best of our knowledge, this work is a first of its kind, in providing service assurance associated with task execution by crowd workers, with respect to enterprise tasks. We implemented the proposed framework and conducted a four-week long, large scale crowd sourcing experiment involving digitization of forms posted by an enterprise requester. Our results validate the efficacy of the proposed service assurance framework for enterprise crowd sourcing and advocate its adoption.