Is BPO Work Crowdsourcable?

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. 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. Our findings are classified under five themes: Workplace ecology, Data Entry skills, Achieving the Service Level Agreement (SLA); Making the workflow work and Collaborative working. The main contribution of the paper is to provide a grounded discussion of what it means to crowdsource a business process activity. By focusing on the wider context of the work we highlight a number of areas for further research.