Abstract
The digital transformation of consulting is a phenomenon that can affect both external and internal processes of a consulting firm. Consequently, consulting firms should analyze and monitor not only customer-faced processes but also processes that occur in back offices and without any client interaction. The following case study addresses two issues. First, it gives insights of the status of the digital transformation of a German IT- and Management-Consulting firm with more than 1500 employees. It applies the current knowledge about the virtualization of consulting services in a real life setting. Second, the case study describes, how internal processes can be virtualized and digitally transformed via the implementation of a digital platform that will enable a crowd workplace. The paper concludes with implications for practitioners and future research.
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Notes
- 1.
Kittur et al. (2013) define crowd work as “[…] paid, online crowd work, which we define here as the performance of tasks online by distributed crowd workers who are financially compensated by requesters (individuals, groups, or organizations).”
- 2.
Leimeister et al. 2015 define crowd sourcing as follows: “In crowdsourcing, a crowd sourcer who can be a business, organization, group or individual, proposes an open call to an undefined set of potential contributors (crowdsources or crowd workers). These crowd workers, who can be individuals, formal or informal groups, organizations or companies, will take over the task. The following interaction process takes place via IT-supported crowdsourcing platforms. The performance of crowdsourcing lies in the aggregation of multitude knowledge and resources of different and independent contributors as well as in the possibilities of decomposition, distribution, parallelization, standardization and automation as well as subsequent aggregation of partial tasks.”
- 3.
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome (last visit 27-April-2017).
- 4.
https://www.spreadshirt.de/ (last visit 27-April-2017).
- 5.
https://www.innocentive.com/ (last visit 27-April-2017).
- 6.
Crowdsourcing platforms take over the IT-supported coordination of crowdsourcing initiatives and bring together the crowd sourcer with the crowd (Leimeister et al. 2016; Martin et al. 2008). They thus represent the framework and stage for crowdsourcing activities. A distinction can be made between company-owned and external platforms (Leimeister et al. 2016).
- 7.
Rymer et al. (2016) define low-code platforms as follows: “Platforms enable rapid delivery of business applications with a minimum of hand-coding and minimal upfront investment in setup, training and deployment.” Key features of the low-code approach are: a large number of development and design tools are provided, which drastically reduce programming effort; processes and standards of software development are fully supported from the outset; access to prototypes and experimental platforms is comprehensive and often free of charge.
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Seifert, H., Nissen, V. (2018). Crowd Workplace—A Case Study on the Digital Transformation Within IT- and Management-Consulting. In: Nissen, V. (eds) Digital Transformation of the Consulting Industry. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70491-3_12
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