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Form digitization in BPO: from outsourcing to crowdsourcing?

Published: 27 April 2013 Publication History

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.

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Cited By

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  • (2016)"I Love All the Bits"Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2858036.2858433(3956-3969)Online publication date: 7-May-2016
  • (2016)Assignment Techniques for Crowdsourcing Sensitive TasksProceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing10.1145/2818048.2835202(836-847)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2016
  • (2016)Service Assurance Sustaining Enterprise Task Crowdsourcing Service2016 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC)10.1109/SCC.2016.100(728-735)Online publication date: Jun-2016
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2013
      3550 pages
      ISBN:9781450318990
      DOI:10.1145/2470654
      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. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 27 April 2013

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      Author Tags

      1. business process
      2. crowdsourcing
      3. ethnography
      4. outsourcing

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      CHI '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 392 of 1,963 submissions, 20%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2016)"I Love All the Bits"Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2858036.2858433(3956-3969)Online publication date: 7-May-2016
      • (2016)Assignment Techniques for Crowdsourcing Sensitive TasksProceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing10.1145/2818048.2835202(836-847)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2016
      • (2016)Service Assurance Sustaining Enterprise Task Crowdsourcing Service2016 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC)10.1109/SCC.2016.100(728-735)Online publication date: Jun-2016
      • (2016)Factors influencing the decision to crowdsourceInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-015-9578-x18:1(47-68)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2016
      • (2015)CrowdsourcingComputer Science Review10.1016/j.cosrev.2015.05.00117:C(43-69)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2015
      • (2014)Turk-Life in IndiaProceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/2660398.2660403(1-11)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2014
      • (2014)The four pillars of crowdsourcing: A reference model2014 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS)10.1109/RCIS.2014.6861072(1-12)Online publication date: May-2014
      • (2013)Relationship-Based Business Process Crowdsourcing?Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 201310.1007/978-3-642-40498-6_33(429-446)Online publication date: 2013

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