Form digitization in BPO
Jacki O’Neill, Shourya Roy, Antonietta Maria Grasso, DAVID J. MARTIN · 2013
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.