Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing platform that enables businesses to post micro tasks to be completed by workers. Crowdsourcing, a subcategory of outsourcing, allows employers to use large online crowds available 24/7 to do work which in the past would have been completed by permanent internal staff. Robust online platforms have been developed to attract large numbers of workers, deliver work to them and manage payment for completed work. MTurk started just over ten years ago and according to the World Bank by 2015 had amassed over 500,000 registered workers worldwide.
The crowdsourcing method can be used to solve innovation or design problems. It can be used for complex projects and macro tasks. However, MTurk focuses on micro tasks and has grown to be one of the most used micro task crowdsourcing platforms. Once a worker has applied and been accepted to Mturk, they complete a series of tasks used to qualify the type of work they can complete. Once qualified, the worker has access to accept and complete HITs, human intelligence tasks. MTurk refers to it's micro tasks as human intelligence tasks; tasks that computers aren't capable of completing or the cost is uncompetitive versus a human worker.
Since the recession and even earlier, with the advancement of technology, businesses drastically downsized administrative staff. We find the employers with 500-1000 employees, have on average a dozen administrative employees. We have seen a rise on analyst level employees but technical qualifications, job scope and compensation differ largely between these two employee groups. Employers simply don't have the staff to do highly repetitive, simple tasks such as consolidating customer addresses between three different data sets.
RATINGS: 4.5 OUT OF 5 STARS.
Strength: The very large on-demand workforce that MTurk provides is incredibly powerful for businesses that need large amounts of data cleaning, data integrity, surveys, simple consolidations, SEO validation etc. The platform while not esthetically slick, is easy to use for both workers and employers. Employers might fear that the most daunting part of using MTurk is setting up HITs, micro tasks, how to track work completed and quality of work; however, employers overall state that the tool is easy to use and allows them to be very time efficient.
Weakness: Amazon Mechanical Turk doesn't provide businesses much guidance on how to price HITs or how to develop a micro task strategy for multi-layered projects. It's a simple platform but some planning and forethought will be necessary to manage work in a sequential manner. Additionally, employers need to consider and research carefully how much they'll pay for a task to make sure they have enough appeal to attract workers.
Best Use: Crowdsourcing is an excellent option employers can utilize for a fractional cost of outsourced staffing to complete micro tasks quickly and without allocating internal resources such as work space, computers, etc. A typical scenario that plays out across mid-sized and large companies worldwide- a system implementation is in process but before data can be converted or transferred it needs to be scrubbed to match new formats or cleaned for better integrity. The project manager (PM) is discouraged looking at thousands of lines of data and wondering how this work can get done in the allocated time and budget. The PM and a few team members start plugging away at the project, the PM realizes a few days later that they've barely made progress. In his solace, he strolls down to his HR manager's office and begs for a temporary resource to support the project. Leadership quickly approves worried about this bottleneck in the system implementation. HR contacts a temp agency, within 24-48 hours HR presents 3 resumes to the PM, the PM chooses to bring in two people in for interviews. Two or three days later, interviews are done and the interviewers, HR typically and the PM agree on one of the temporary workers. HR quickly works with IT to set up a work station, assign a computer and work with the agency to get the temporary worker to start on a particular day, at a particular time. Under perfect circumstances, this process takes a week or two. Typically, it's at minimum 2-3 weeks before there's a body plugging away on the project. The amount of time (conversations, interviews, negotiations etc.) and internal resources allocated (budget, computer, work space) are numerous and extremely inefficient. Next time, give MTurk a try and see how much easier, faster and cheaper it is to complete micro tasks. It might even inspire a team to initiate projects and solutions without the fear of staff shortages.