Winning by Sharing

Fractional work emerges

I've been writing about the emergence of fractional work for some time now.  The UK's Peopleperhour is a platform for sourcing people on a literally per hour/per day basis.  My contention is that the only area in which we've not seen serious innovation by large companies is with their labour models.  When big companies start to adopt a fractional approach to at least some areas of their workforce......

Winning by Sharing is a collection of true stories combined with market research and analysis about the future of work, how profoundly it will affect people in the next decade, and how this will take most people by surprise.

"Imagine organizations in which most workers aren’t employees at all, but electronically connected freelancers living wherever they want  to. And imagine that all this freedom in business lets people get more of whatever they really want in life – money, interesting work, the chance to help others, or time with their families.” Thomas Malone, The future of work

Strong & Connected

Research to be undertaken on platforms for enabling group/team based collaboration as exemplified by ki work.

University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has published its Key transformative research focus on four main areas: Virtual organizations for distributed communities;  high-performance computing; data, visualization, and interaction; and education and workforce development.

NSF article goes onto describe....

PRAC is another smaller-scale program that provides money for people to travel and develop their collaborations. So you might say that's money to develop virtual organizations.

Signs of fractional work continue to emerge.

The credit crunch and the rise of ki work

Winning by Sharing is a collection of true stories combined with market research and analysis about the future of work, how profoundly it will affect people in the next decade, and how this will take most people by surprise. Leon Benjamin, circa 2004.

Michael & Jim Wolff explain in this slide show why ki work is finally making sense for the "people who have been taken by surprise".

Credit Crisis to Collaborative Capitalism

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: internet collaboration)

Ki work: A platform for fractional work

Michael Wolff has been explaining what ki work is for many years.  This is perhaps one of the best explanations because he's set it in context so well. In a recent email thread written in response to a query from an interim management firm Michael says;

people4business.com is a neatly structured freelance marketplace, primarily serving buyers and professionals in the UK. it is one of about a hundred “me-too” businesses that have followed the original models developed by elance and guru. apart from UK focus, it has very little to differentiate itself from the other 100 service providers in this market.

The underlying assumption of all elance look-alikes is that the fundamental organisational principle in all business is that demonstrated by the “firm”* or modern corporation. buyers are some kind of corporation, however small, and sellers are employed contractors to these corporations. the underlying reason is that hitherto it has been more sustainable and cost effective for businesses to be organised in this way, rather than a situation where the economy consisting exclusively of a multitude of independent, self-employed people who contract with one another. this model of business was classically explained by ronald coase in 1937 in his famous article: the nature of the firm.

However ki work is truly part of the online work revolution. we see the emergence of a new organisational model that is structured in such a way that “a multitude of independent, self-employed people who contract with one another” are able to complete transactions as reliably, but more cost-effectively, than the conventional firm. this organisational model has been pioneered within the open source development environment (http://sourceforce.org) and described in Yochai Benkler’s seminal work: coase’s penguin, or linux and the nature of the firm.

ki work takes the organisational concepts of sourceforge (where open source projects are organised on a free basis) and translates them into a model where multiple online work projects can be executed with remuneration for the suppliers. just as sourceforge is a utility enabling virtual open projects, so is ki work the utility for paid virtual projects.

Hence ki work’s main differentiator from the elance model: an organisational structure comprised of category marketplaces, which are  co-ordinated by category leaders and experts. this forms the basis for the creation of virtually outsourced projects, executed by “a multitude of independent, self-employed people who contract with one another”.

What relevance does this have in the interim management market? until you surfaced we did not include “interim management” as a category. our perception is that interim managers focus primarily on getting work in conventional businesses as a form of temporary employment (rather like elance), and as such, are not generally attuned to becoming leading players in the emergent virtual outsourcing market. however, I suspect that a small percentage (maybe 20%) of interim managers would be interested in the emergent opportunities, and I see our “interim management” category as being an alternative to “project management”.

So regarding people4business.com and all the other ones like them, I do not see these as a threat but as a valuable channel for creating awareness in the marketplace. the elance model, now 10 years old, is due to be superseded by the virtual organisational model. ki work is leading the way.

These models are starting to emerge in the creative industries.  Andy Law of St Luke's has created a worldwide network of partners at The LAW Firm, Citizen Agency started as a network of advertising, marketing and web 2,0 professionals, and John Caswell's GroupPartners' expert network delivers most of the value to its clients.  So when will we see Agency.com, AKQA, BBH and others adopt these fractional models of work and start leveraging these platforms to make their biggest cost (people) variable rather than fixed?

Outsourcing relationships

Michael Wolff of ki work sent me a quick round up of 'news from the front' surrounding LinkedIn's recent valuation.  He says;

• Linkedin raises another $53m valuing the company at around $1 billion.
• About 23 million people in 150 countries have set up profiles on Linkedin so far, with another 1.2 million members signing up each month (growth rate 5.2% per month compared to facebook 12.5% per month)
• Ning currently valued at $500 million.
• On recent series C funding for oDesk of $15m, I suspect this would be on a valuation of $100m +

So, pretty hot area for investors.

It occurred to me a long time ago that companies are outsourcing their relationships to LinkedIn.  One area where this is having a profound impact is in recruitment, where the relationships recruiters form with prospective candidates are managed outside company boundaries and on other platforms.  Small, smart recruiters like Fred do all their candidate generation on Facebook, Twitter (the 140 charcater CV) and LinkedIn.

Large corporations who have not woken up to the demands of Generation Y, and the innate need for people to form groups and communities of practice, are missing an opportunity to create organisations as productive as the open source community.  Years ago there was an active community of Air India pilots on CommunityZero because the company just couldn't (and probably still doesn't) provide an online environment for its people to exchange professional experiences.  Large programmes of change taking place in big companies to this day do not even consider building collaborative, social architectures of participation on which they can execute change. 

Thnk about this for a moment.  LinkedIN and a number of other business networks could conduct an analysis on their data to derive a social graph of a large percentage of people from a single organisation.  The graph would show the frequency and strength of inter-relationships and identitfy Influencers and connectors, in real time. 

Maybe this unintentional transparency is a good thing? Maybe knowing what these inter-relationships are is worth much more than $1 billion?

ki work. They don't live for work ... they work to live

ki work launches a platform for matching freelancers to sources of work that enables individuals to create and maintain virtual companies (or rather trusted groups), and buyers of professional services access to a virtual work force.  Hat tip to founder Michael Wolff and the formidable team he's assembled that have dedicated the past five years meticulously refining the execution of collaborative work and self-organisation, described more recently by Clay Shirky in his book Here comes everybody.

I sense this may attract Generation Y people as much as it does established freelancers judging by the recent article in The Guardian entitled They don't live for work ... they work to live.  At the risk of boasting, I made this quite clear in 2004;

"The internet has caused a fundamental change in attitude towards work and the realisation that a 'career' has ceased to be a feasible way to organise working life. People now view work as an instrument of self-development and personal autonomy and entrepreneurship not as a status symbol, but as an attitude - an attitude that everyone is going to need."

Interestingly BusinessWeek recently published an article Beyond Blogs that aptly captures the shift in the nature of work in Western economies under a sub-heading  - THE 140-CHARACTER RESUME.  ki work's members recognise how profoundly the nature of work is changing which over the next decade will take most people by surprise.