Zazaleena Zakariah

Crowdsourcing: The Trend of Prior Studies

Crowdsourcing is view as major changes in current economy as it has revolutionary effects on organizations. Unlike previous outsourcing trends that practices closed inter-organizational relationships subject to the long-term legal contract, these new crowdsourcing practices take place in an open and virtual context, characterized with small and short-term deals. Crowdsourcing has been recognized as new industry that able to uplift the economy and bring significant benefits to business and people in general. Although the phenomenon of crowdsourcing is fairly new and still in a formative stage, the indications and predictions are optimistic. Under the recent Malaysian government initiatives called Digital Malaysia, various crowdsourcing efforts and programs have been introduced. This paper reports on the review of prior studies pertaining crowdsourcing from a general view.

Business model of crowdsourcing: Review paper

Crowdsourcing is a new wave of outsourcing which has become a new society paradigm that might change the outsourcing landscape in the future. Crowdsourcing offers substantial benefits to the involved parties. For crowdworkers, crowdsourcing offers flexibility in terms of time, locations and durations of doing tasks given to them and the most important is crowdsourcing will give them additional income to complement existing income that will help them to uplift their lifestyle. To organizations, crowdsourcing offers access to pool of talents or skills from all over the world which would not be economically feasible to maintain in-house or acquire out of house. In addition, faster execution as the tasks can be completed without having to hire or/ and train new employees. Since crowdsourcing is considered as a new business concept which involves different integrations of crowd worker, job provider and crowdsourcing web based platform, proper crowdsourcing initiatives need to be strategically planned and evaluated. Hence, this study will look into one of crowdsourcing important part which is crowdsourcing business model. Business models are very crucial as it will explain a plan for the successful operation of a business, identifying sources of revenue, the intended customer base, products, and details of financing. This paper reviews the existing business model of crowdsourcing and critical analysis for each business model.

Crowdsourcing business model for low income community: Conceptual model

In todays world, companies support many of their business processes by outsourcing tasks or jobs to third-party providers located all over the world. The trend of outsourcing recently is to use Internet as the main sourcing platform. The latest trend of outsourcing is crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing has similar concept of outsourcing, but instead of outsource to business, crowdsourcing will outsource the task or job to a group of people or community. Nowadays, community is facing great challenge in uplifting and maintaining their lifestyle and mostly due to issues regarding employment. It is reported that the greatest issues facing developing countries is a growing population in need of employment. Due to that issue, world are facing flood of low income community. Crowdsourcing is one potential solution to the issues and opportunities present globally today. Considering the advantages of crowdsourcing, the concept has been implemented in many developing countries such as India, Nepal and Philippines. The main aim of this paper is to generate understanding related to crowdsourcing business model factors which impact the low income community. Drawing on existing researches on crowdsourcing business model and low income community, this paper formulates a conceptual model of crowdsourcing business model for low income community. The research presents a conceptual model that highlights the factors of crowdsourcing business model based on crowdsourcer, crowdworker and platform.

Retailers’ Perspective on Electronic Reservation Services in Malaysia

The study of electronic reservation for hotel services has been carried out with objectives that need to be achieved. The objectives are to identify hotel retailers’ perception towards the electronic reservation service quality provided by them and to provide recommendations and suggestions for retailers that can be used in improving their electronic reservation service. The study was conducted by distributing questionnaires to five hotel retailers, where each hotel is given ten questionnaires. The study is based on 11 dimensions of electronic service quality and 42 electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) features. Both groups of factors are used in assessing retailers’ perception. The study shows that few hotel retailers are ignoring some important dimensions in fulfilling customers’ needs such as support dimension. Hotel retailers also abandoned some minor factors able to attract customers such as incentive which are important for customers. The study also indicates that hotel retailers should take serious consideration on giving incentives to customers as rewards, hence creating loyal customers. Based on suggestions and recommendations given by respondents, hotel retailers should improve the electronic reservation service from all 11 dimensions, and serious action should be taken into consideration on the most popular topic discussed by respondents, which are support dimension and incentive dimension.

Electronic Reservation Services in Malaysia from Customers’ Perspective

The growth of electronic reservation services in Malaysia has been enormous over the last few years as the services offer many advantages to the involved parties, especially customers and retailers. Responding to the widely used of the electronic reservation services, the study is conducted to determine perceptions and preferences of customers toward the services offered in Malaysia. There are not much research or study been conducted in Malaysia to enhance the understanding on customers’ demographic information and customers’ perceptions toward the services. The study objectives are to identify customers’ perceptions toward the electronic reservation for hotel services and to provide recommendation for retailers to enhance their electronic reservation services quality. The target customers for the study include all hotels’ customers in Malaysia; either they are using the electronic reservation services in carrying out their reservation affairs or not. Customers are randomly selected in gaining their perceptions toward the existing electronic reservation services and suggestions in improving the services quality. This study is conducted by distributing questionnaires to 200 customers that have been randomly selected. The study indicates that as an overall view, customers’ perception score can be considered as high with all 11 dimensions of electronic services quality obtained being more than 70 % out of 100 %. Through the study, it is identified that customers are really concerned about incentives given to them by hotel retailers when they carried out their reservation affair online. Through the recommendations and suggestions part, respondents have given their opinion on how to improve and enhance the electronic reservation services quality. The recommendation and suggestion have been grouped into 11 dimensions of electronic services quality.

Mapping data in e-pracCS system

Traditionally, legacy systems suffer from poor design documentation and thus make the maintenance job more difficult. Hence without having a good understanding of the existing system we cannot extend it in a better and efficient way. DBRE is a process of extracting database requirements from implemented system. Normalization usually involves dividing a database into two or more tables and defining relationships between the tables. There are generally guideline for perform the normalization but it hard to explain especially for an example university student. It is because data normalization is the process based on widely accepted rules. In this research, e-pracCS is a system that implements the DBRE process on it. Then, a diagrammatic model is developed to represent a relationship between a data in the system and an introductory of normalization process.