Crowdsourcing Workflow Optimization to Internal Worker Crowds

Business service companies generate revenue by delivering high-quality services to their clients. Such business services could be customer support, transaction processing, information technology, etc. Given the large service volume, meeting strict service level agreements while maintaining a reasonable profit margin can be challenging. Naturally, the worker crowd is trained by the enterprise using carefully designed standard operations and workflows aimed at maximizing its performance and thus the output. Service delivering workflows are never perfect, continuous effort must be invested into improving and optimizing the workflows. However, such effort is usually difficult to sustain. Despite considerable advances in the workflow optimization technologies, a business analyst may still spend countless hours studying the workflow in order to identify the opportunities for improvement. This issue motivated us to develop a novel crowd-based framework to utilize the worker crowd for workflow optimization. In this paper, we illustrate our approach to effectively leverage the internal worker crowd to improve the workflows for the enterprise. A modeling is provided to elaborate the different stages in the framework. And a reference implementation is detailed to demonstrate the practical use of the framework.