Form Digitization in BPO: From Outsourcing to Crowdsourcing? Jacki O’Neill 1 Shourya Roy 2 1 Xerox Research Centre Europe 6 Chemin de Maupertuis Meylan, 38240, France [name.surname]@xrce.xerox.com Antonietta Grasso 1 David Martin 1 2 Xerox Research Centre India Bangalore, India shourya.roy@xerox.com ABSTRACT This paper describes an ethnographic study of an outsourced business process – the digitization of healthcare forms. The aim of the study was to understand how the work is currently organized, with an eye to uncovering the research challenges which need to be addressed if that work is to be crowdsourced. The findings are organised under four emergent themes: Workplace Ecology, Data Entry Skills and Knowledge, Achieving Targets and Collaborative Working. For each theme a description of how the work is undertaken in the outsourcer’s Indian office locations is given, followed by the implications for crowdsourcing that work. This research is a first step in understanding how crowdsourcing might be applied to BPO activities. The paper examines features specific to form digitization – extreme distribution and form decomposition – and lightly touches on the crowdsourcing of BPO work more generally. Author Keywords Crowdsourcing; Ethnography; Business Process; Outsourcing. ACM Classification Keywords J.4 [Social and behavioral sciences] Sociology; H.5.3 [Group and Organization Interfaces]: Collaborative computing. General Terms Human Factors; Design. INTRODUCTION When the Web moved from a publishing platform to a collaborative one, a new set of possibilities for distributed and collaborative working arose. Web 2.0 has made possible a scale of collaboration that was not conceivable before. We use the term collaboration in a loose manner: many individuals can contribute small parts to create some greater whole without necessarily having to work together or coordinate overtly. Crowdsourcing – basically where task outsourcing is delegated to a largely unknown Internet audience – is emerging as a major example of such collaboration. 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 anonymous people, in the form of an open call 1 . Over the last few years crowdsourcing has been becoming increasingly popular due to factors such as the proliferation of Internet access and mobile devices in emerging nations like India, and increasing numbers of people opting for alternate modes of employment [11]. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is probably the best known crowdsourcing micro-task platform where a group of individuals or organizations (requesters) post small tasks in large volumes to be taken up by individuals (workers) for execution. After execution, the workers post back their results for evaluation and get paid on acceptance by the requester. Examples of such tasks range from digitization of scanned documents, translation of text, to transcription of audio files and so on. AMT has thousands of such tasks of small granularity which often can be executed in seconds and minutes, with payments usually in the order of a few cents. In the business world questions are being raised about whether crowdsourcing could be a replacement for outsourcing, and a number of small scale start-ups seem to be quite convinced about the business potential. CrowdEngineering, Microtask, CrowdFlower, ClickWorker, LiveOPs, GetSatisfaction, DSTTechnologies, are a few representative ones. Whilst some companies employ task-specialized crowds, others make use of general micro-task platforms such as AMT to execute tasks which companies used to previously outsource. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) started gaining critical mass nearly two decades ago when companies from USA and Europe started migrating ‘non-core’ business processes like administration and customer care to the new BPO specialists primarily as a means of cost saving. This was followed closely by ‘off-shoring’ where the work was moved to countries with lower labour costs, such as India. Technology innovation was crucial in this radically different delivery model where work origin and workers 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI 2013, April 27–May 2, 2013, Paris, France. Copyright © 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-1899-0/13/04...$15.00.