Smaller businesses can optimize processes by focusing on what's core to their success. Online outsourcing and collaboration services enable smaller businesses to do just that.
In 1998, Thomas Malone, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began to write about a fundamental change in the way business is done.
Malone predicted that the trend toward businesses growing ever larger and more structured would give way to a new model in which advanced communications technologies allow individuals and small teams to assemble quickly, collaborate to solve business problems, and then disband, free to move on to other challenges. Malone called this electronically enabled freelancing the E-Lance economy, and it is interesting to look at the progress of this 9-year-old vision.
Collaboration is the Future for Business
Research tells us that collaboration and personalization will be important differentiators to the business of the future, and because they are naturally more flexible, smaller organizations are uniquely positioned to take advantage of these opportunities. Those that adapt to this changing environment find new opportunities around every corner.
In today's fast-moving economy, staying focused is essential to success. For a smaller business, understanding what is core to success and what is context is critical. Core activities are central to the success of the business, provide differentiating value, and are where internal resources should be focused. Context activities, on the other hand, are often better served by partnering with another organization for which the activities are core. Technology has fostered new ways for needs and skills to be matched up quickly. As one example, a variety of Web services now function as an eBay of sorts for skills and services.
Portals such as InnoCentive, where businesses seek creative solutions for research and development challenges from scientists and small research teams; Elance, a network that brings small creative-services teams together with projects; and Mechanical Turk, where individuals apply their intelligence to simple challenges best suited for human brains, are emblematic of the type of free-market systems to which small businesses can turn.
Diversify and Optimize
Business is, by nature, a cyclic endeavor. An important benefit of the E-Lance phenomenon is the ability for smaller businesses to diversify their engagements and optimize business processes. These electronic clearinghouses for skills and services are worldwide, so they offer a huge ocean of potential customers. By expanding beyond the local yellow pages, smaller businesses can surmount local economic hurdles and create a more robust and reliable client pool.
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Also, because the tasks that are advertised online range from large to small, smart business planners can fill periodic dead spots on their calendar with appropriate jobs. As a consumer, I benefit from the choice of skills available, and from not having to keep a resource on retainer when I don't need the service. The smaller business benefits by maintaining a much more predictable schedule. The connected nature of today's society offers unprecedented opportunity for smaller businesses.
Here are a few tips for taking advantage of the change:
- Focus on what's core to your business
- Look for ways to accentuate your differentiation and improve your value-add
- Use online tools to expand your opportunity base and manage workload
- Seek out ways to offer personalized and collaborative solutions to problems
One of the benefits to this new environment is an increased ability to work smarter, not harder. While being a good communicator is an important part of my job, the actual writing of articles and reports takes away from the time available for me to conceptualize and interpret research. In an effort to focus more on my core, and to learn more about the concept, I recently took advantage of the talent bazaar available at Elance.com.
I spent a few minutes crafting a job description for a short article I needed written and posted it to the eLance site. Within 48 hours, I received a dozen bids from around the world ranging in price from $25 to $250. The electronic satisfaction index, testimonials, and work examples on the site helped me narrow my choices, and in less than a week a professional writer was working on the article.
Over the next two weeks, tools such as instant messenger, voice over IP, and e-mail let me respond to the writer's questions, review the early drafts, and participate in the process of creation at a more appropriate level. In other words, I stayed focused on my core skills and outsourced the context, and, in true symbiosis, so did the writer.
Roger Farnsworth is the research director for Cisco's Executive Thought Leadership.
