Business Information Systems

Business Information Systems

Introduction

With the advent of modern technology, the Internet has replaced most ways of obtaining information. One such method of obtaining information is crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing has revolutionized the way services are rendered, with an online community taking up the tradtional role of suppliers. Forever 21, the popular American fashion retail chain has hired a leading international consulting firm to advice on global crowd sourcing. As a junior consultant, specializing in Information Systems at the firm, I have been tasked with recommending crowdsourcing strategies for Forever 21. In doing so, I shall investigate the crowdsourcing phenomenon and aim to identify the best crowd sourcing strategy for Forever 21. The client has identified platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), Freelancer, oDesk, Would You Rock This (WYRT), and Spoonflower to be off particular interest. As a junior consultant, I have thus evaluated these platforms and then put forward my recommendation on the best crowdsourcing platform. One that I believe is capable of posing radical challenges or opportunities in line with Forever 21’s objectives and operations (Allen, 2011).

In-Depth Analysis of the Various Types of Crowd Sourcing Platforms

In this section, I shall conduct an in-depth analysis of the aforementioned crowd sourcing platforms on the basis of their target markets (Barnes, Hinton, &  Mieczkowska. 2003).

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk): The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a swarm sourcing Internet commercial center that empowers people and organizations (known as Requesters) to organize the utilization of human insight to perform undertakings that PCs are at present not able to do. It is one of the destinations of Amazon Web Services. The Requesters have the capacity to post errands known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), for example, picking the best among a few photos of a storefront, composition item portrayals, or distinguishing entertainers on music CDs. Laborers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service, or, all the more casually, Turkers) can then search among existing errands and complete them for a money related installment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesters utilize an open application programming interface (API), or the more restricted MTurk Requester site. Requesters are limited to US-based substances (Brabham, 2013).

In MTurk, specialists set their own hours and are not under any commitment to acknowledge any work they don't wish to do. Since specialists are paid as foremen instead of representatives, requesters don't need to record shapes for, nor pay finance charges. Therefore, they are able to forward the lowest pay permitted by law. Specialists, however, must report their pay as independent work pay. The normal compensation for the numerous micro tasks allotted, on the off chance that they are done rapidly, is around a dollar an hour, with every undertaking averaging a couple of cents (Garcia, 2007).