So, I had a strange experience this week because I was in a meeting with a few bankers and I started talking about Second Life, and started to tell them about the banks that are opened there. Half of them had never heard of it, so I logged in and flew over to a bank and walked my avatar up to the receptionist at the front of the bank. My first shock was that it was actually one of the owners, my second shock was then he told me that Second Life had shut down all the banks because of rampant fraud. Looks like SL will be forming a process to certify banks from now on so people do not get ripped off in avatar-land in the future. The bizarre thing was that I was sitting in front of the bankers in real space, and showing them the drama on cyber space.

So back to outsourcing and crowdsourcing… Technology has had a lot to do with the whole paradigm of outsourcing work. It’s only because of the ability to easily and cheaply communicate with people around the world that we can even use this model. Add to that the fact that a large amount of the outsourcing that is being done relates to or uses technology in some way. We are now able to create computerized workflows that let US based people do part of a task, and then automatically route other parts overseas. I see no reason that outsourcing will not continue to flourish, and that the workbases will exist in countries all over the world. In fact, we will one day stop thinking of workbases in terms of India, China, Malaysia and the like. We will simply deal with companies that specialize in different forms of outsources and services. We will look at quality and price statistics and make a choice as to who we want to hire to do a task based on our needs for quality, speed and cost.

Technology will continue to facilitate our ability to advance the outsourcing model. And maybe the next really interesting step is crowdsourcing…

Crowdsourcing is a word that has been in our vocabulary for 18 months or so and it first appeared to describe the method by which Wikipedia and other user-built sites got created. Then we began to find interesting business ways to leverage the Internet herd. We started tapping them for opinions, and to answer questions for each others (yahoo answers) and even to create indexes for pictures on Google through games. The natural progression had to be finding ways to crowdsource work that is now being outsourced. In other words, spread it out over hundreds of disparate workers around the world and let them be paid in small pieces for the bits they do within specs. Last week I read a story about a major company that has divided up a large software project into small pieces and has posted the work on the Internet with the associated pay. Programmers around the world can simply apply for a piece, write the code, and submit, and once it is tested and passes, they get paid. Over 100 programmers are going to build the application and they will never sit next to each other and will never set foot in the home office. This is sign of things to come, and you heard it here at Technology Story. Ten years from now, this type of work dispersion will seem a normal part of life.

So what do you think that will do to change the way people are “employed”?

Scott

Editor: Picture Credit: Prokofy Neva (a.k.a. Catherine Fitzpatrick)