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Loading ...Microsourcing, or personal assistant 2.0
It’s a cliché, but when I need some personal outsourcing, I usually turn to my wife.
After less than two years of marriage, it’s almost embarrassing how many elements of my life she takes care of, including my income tax return, daily lunches and sourcing replacements for a lost toque. She would probably bristle at the term “outsourcing,” but it’s better than calling her a personal assistant. Plus, she outsources her fair share of work to me, including typing, laundry and vacuuming. It seems to be the rest of the world that turns to actual businesses to handle such tasks, an approach I’m calling, for lack of a better term, “microsourcing.”
There have been a couple of articles in Canadian media recently documenting this trend, including a recent feature in the Toronto Star that included several examples of microsourcing such as tutoring and apartment searching. There was even a hint at where it all started.
“The trend to personal outsourcing owes much to 29-year-old Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, a best-seller that advocates contracting out as much drudgery as possible, at work and at home, freeing you to concentrate on more profitable endeavours, or golfing,” the Star article said. “Ten years after the trend began with multinationals outsourcing computer coding and customer service to India’s cheap, well-educated workforce, small businesses are jumping on the bandwagon. Right on their heels are overburdened ordinary people farming out the minutia of their lives.”
What the article doesn’t delve into – and which few in this space have addressed – is the fact microsourcing is only safe as long as it sticks with the minutia, and there’s every reason to believe it won’t. Personal outsourcing is being described as something we would only do to manage our personal time, but before long there will be more business users turning to companies to manage routine, but often mundane elements of their workdays as well.
As a middle manager in a mid-sized company, I don’t have a personal assistant to take care of the things like picking up dry cleaning or answering my phone. But on the other hand, I don’t really mind doing those things. The chores that really seem to waste my time includes like filing my expenses, submitting time and attendance reports, managing my e-mail inbox – in other words, a lot of the necessary but often unfulfilling IT-enabled processes.
In the same way that employees are using consumer technology to perform business tasks, those with a little discretionary spending in their budgets may soon turn to consumer-oriented personal outsourcing services to get some extra work done. Like those multinationals, they will also be exposed to the unmet expectations, poor standards of quality and overall underperformance that plagued the first wave of IT outsourcing contracts. Worse, employers may not realize until something horrible happens that their mission-critical data has become more vulnerable through exposure to a third-party personal outsourcing service. I call it microsourcing, but farming out the small stuff will eventually lead to some big problems.
February 26th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
A wife is quite different from a personal assistant. It is pretty odd to think that a wife is a personal assistant, but somehow true. She fix things for you, she always work things for you.
February 26th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
I hardly think that microsourcing your expense claims to be filled in qualifies as mission critical that will bring down a global empire.
What problems do you forsee happening?
Gavin Allinson