Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1037
the quarterly magazine of ILTA 17 Peer to Peer liveops and amazon demonstrate the wide range of opportunities that cloud resourcing represents. In addition to its SaaS technology platform called Contact Center in the Cloud, LiveOps offers Workforce in the Cloud, an on-demand workforce for outsourcing call center calls. LiveOps customers can staff the Contact Center with their own employees and/or outsource to LiveOps agents on a routine basis or as-needed to handle fluctuating call volumes. The Workforce solution is a masterpiece of cloud resourcing. LiveOps agents — all 20,000 of them — work as independent contractors from home and make their own hours. Motivation is guaranteed. The platform tracks their performance on every call, and routes incoming calls preferentially to the best- performing agent available who, in return, earns a premium wage. According to LiveOps, results include 30 percent on average more revenue per campaign, direct response call abandonment rates of less than 1 percent, and 10 percent agent attrition compared to 100 percent in brick-and-mortar call centers. By contrast, Amazon's Mechanical Turk relies on "crowd sourcing" instead of a standing workforce. A requester posts a job (called a HIT, or Human Intelligence Task), sets a price per unit of work and a delivery time frame, and anybody in the world can accept and fulfill the request. The work is usually simple — propose keywords, label images — and can't be accomplished by computers. Amazon named this Web service after a chess- playing machine, the Mechanical Turk, which toured Europe as a curiosity at the end of the 18th century. Billed as a robot capable of playing on its own, the Turk actually encased a human chess master. The name plays on the nature of the service. The MTurk application coordinates the marketplace and manages the small units of work and pay while real people do the work. The extraordinary thing is that they show up without prior arrangement and work for pennies. ILTA Cloud Resourcing Applied We're talking about cloud computing online right now. ILTA MEMBERS, join your peers online in the ILTA E-Group discussion forums. This popular member benefit is a members-only, topic-driven, online forum designed to improve communication among peers. There is no better place to get advice, exchange ideas, learn from first-hand experience and benefit from the knowledge of other legal IT professionals. How does it work? Log in to E-Groups from the ILTA homepage and subscribe the forums that interest you. New posts and replies will be sent to your e-mail inbox as often as you like. Post a message or reply of your own to get answers and recommendations from your peers. Who can subscribe? Any employee of a member law firm or law department can subscribe to any ILTA e-group. TAKE THE CONVERSATION ONLINE Don't miss out on one of the most important benefits of ILTA membership.