Here’s a Concept I Like — ‘Personal Outsourcing’
by Joe McKendrick
Blame it on wiki-nomics.
My colleague over at ebizQ, Gian Trotta, just posted a compelling interview with John Schmidt, chairman of the Integration Consortium, and senior vice president for enterprise architecture at Wells Fargo Bank.
Schmidt talked about the rise of “wiki-nomics,” in particular, the fact that various Web and Enterprise 2.0 services — blogs, wikis, search engines, and the like, have transformed our workspaces into one single gigantic virtual workplace.
As a result, these services are “enabling outsourcing at the individual level,” Schmidt says.
Of course, the term “outsourcing” causes shudders to run up many IT professionals’ spines, but Schmidt said he’s not talking about sending tasks to lower-paid workers somewhere else on the globe. Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.”
That’s the world of Personal Outsourcing.
IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”
