Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: employment

  • Outsourcing’s changing face

    Outsourcing’s changing face

    Outsourcing company freelancer.com regularly releases the fifty fastest moving job descriptions requested by their customers.

    This year’s list shows how the online industry is changing – content creation, social media and SEO job requests are all down substantially as users and gatekeepers like Google adapt to the information flood we all have to deal with.

    Keeping in mind the market that Freelancer.com caters to small businesses and many of the jobs posted are for fairly small – some would say laughingly tiny and insulting – amounts, it’s probably safe to say we’re looking at the low value end of the market.

    Article writing (down 15%), proofreading (5%), blogging (13%) and submission (4%) jobs are probably the cheap and nasty “Demand Media” style of low quality content designed for SEO purposes.

    SEO itself is in trouble with jobs in that sector down 7% indicating Google’s Panda and Penguin search engine changes have achieved their objectives of improving search results and knocking out those gaming the system with low quality content.

    A similar thing has happened with social media. Facebook is too hard for many businesses and they’re not seeing a return on their substantial time investment.

    “Companies in industries from consumer electronics to financial services tell us they’re no longer sure Facebook is the best place to dedicate their social marketing budget—a shocking fact given the site’s dominance among users,” Freelancer quotes Nate Elliott, an analyst at market research firm Forrester.

    A bright part in Freelancer’s list is the rise is in open standards as HTML5 starts moving up the list with 20% growth.

    “The Internet is becoming more interactive, and the technologies that are winning and will continue to win are open standards like HTML5 and jQuery- to the detriment of the incumbents proprietary technology providers like Adobe and Microsoft,” says Freelancer’s CEO Matt Barrie.

    Open standards aren’t winning everywhere though as Apple’s iOS is clearly winning the developer war as iPhone grows by 30% and iPad by 26% compared to Android’s 20%.

    Freelancer’s list is an interesting snapshot at where industry demand is right now, what’s we’re starting to see are some of the transition effects working their way through the system. The rise and fall of the social media and SEO specialists being one of those.

    The full Freelancer list is below;

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  • Creative Quandaries

    Creative Quandaries

    In February, musician, coder and uber-geek David Lowery gave a talk to the SF Music Tech Summit on the difficulties musicians have making money in the online economy.

    Meet the Old Boss, Worse Than The Last Boss is an excellent dissection of the economics of the music industry as it currently stands – and it doesn’t look good for artists.

    David shows how the old distribution model was more rewarding for artists than today’s digital model, the old fashioned record store has largely gone out of business and has been replaced with the iTunes where Apple receive half the income of the local shop but assumes no risk, few costs and a far greater profit margin.

    Similarly, the record labels’ costs and risks haven’t substantially changed but their income has plummeted.

    We’ve seen the controllers of the music distribution business replaced with a far smaller, and more profitable, group of digital gatekeepers.

    A  great line in David’s presentation is just how much money technology company executives are making compared to their record industry counterparts of the 1980s, without taking on the responsibilities for keeping the creative supply pipeline flowing.

    Record labels value content and content creators. Sure they kept a lot of money for their executives (although even mid 90?s music executive pay is dwarfed by tech executive pay.)  But record labels unlike tech companies, know they built  their businesses on those who create content.  Therefore when they were flush with cash they set out to buy the services of as many artists as they could.  This  had the effect of sharing the wealth with musicians.  It may have been uneven it may have been wasteful, it may have not touched every artists and the labels may have pocketed most of the revenue but at least they felt they needed to give something back to the content creators.  They knew artists created something of value.

    The key words in the above passage are “content creators” as the struggles of the music industry are similar to those of writers, photographers and anybody creating original works that can be digitized.

    Probably one of the most interesting aspects of this are that many of the digerati David criticises for their utopian views on technology are themselves marginalised, and often impoverished, by the same economics.

    David links to a number of Huffington Post articles examples, yet it’s Adrianna Huffington and her contemporaries like Chris Anderson who are aggregating paid writers work and turning most of us into digital sharecroppers.

    It’s the Lords of the Digital Manor who are making a return while the bulk of content creators struggles.

    Those digirati, like myself, are making just as poor a living from their work as David’s friends in the music industry.

    What’s clear is we have to find the methods of distributing music and other valuable creative works that benefit the artist or writer, the old models of the publishing, broadcasting and music industries did this – not always fairly, but at least creators were rewarded.

    Right now we’re in a world where information is free and a small group of gatekeepers are controlling what revenues are available.

    It’s unlikely that situation is sustainable and over time we’ll see new models develop to displace the current gatekeepers who may be part of the transition effect to a changed economy.

    The person who figures out the successful model will be the 21st Century’s Randolph Hearst – hopefully they’ll spread the wealth around a bit more than the current gatekeepers.

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  • Bringing your own device and business change

    Bringing your own device and business change

    Two years ago I realised that the management trend of staff bringing their own computers to work – BYOD – was more than a fad when I noticed executives were bringing the then new iPads to meetings.

    Most of these executives worked in organisations where IT departments had waged war on employees connecting their own equipment to the corporate network, so this was a serious development in the computing world.

    In many ways employees had been bringing their own technology devices to work for years. It was, and still is, quite common to see public servants and those working for other bureaucratic organisations arriving at meetings with an underfeatured work supplied handset and their own smartphone.

    IT managers hated this as they saw those private devices as a security risk and another headache for their overworked staff to deal with.

    When the iPod was enthusiastically adopted by the executive suite, the game was over for those IT managers. Suddenly they had to deal with these devices and the issues involved.

    At a seminar run by systems integrator Logicalis earlier this week looked at some of the issues around BYOD for companies. What was striking in their presentations were the need for HR and legal departments to be part of the process for adopting this philosophy.

    The BYOD philosophy is a big jump for organisations as it means relaxing controls on employees and for many managers that is the biggest challenge.

    Part of that challenge is controlling the organisation’s data on devices that could be going anywhere and doing anything.

    While companies like Logicalis and Citrix address this with remote desktop applications that create a virtual Windows desktop on the employee’s device, networking giant Cisco offer their ISE devices to run “identity services” that set up rules controlling what staff can access and where they can access it from.

    Cisco Australia’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Bloch gave a good round earlier this week up of where they see BYOD driving business. To Cisco, the move to mobile devices is irresistible as shown in their Global Mobile Data Traffic Update.

    Interesting both Kevin and the Logicalis speakers see BYOD as being part of the recruitment process. Increasingly younger workers expect they will be able to use their own devices rather than relying upon employer issued workstations and mobile phones.

    According to Kevin, Cisco’s research is finding many employees would trade salary for the right to bring their own device which is something that should grab the attention of budget constrained managers.

    This also ties into other employer trends such as Activity Based Workplaces where companies provide hot desks and staff are expected to store their items away at the end of each workday.

    Ross Miller of the GPT Group described how this is another trend driving the paperless office as staff using hot desks find packing away files and paperwork each day is an unnecessary hassle.

    What we’re seeing with businesses adopting BYOD policies is a big change in the way places operate and this has consequences for all divisions of an organisation from HR and legal through to marketing and corporate affairs. It’s a genuine game changer.

    How the BYOD philosophy is changing business is good example of technology driving our habits and work practices in ways we don’t always anticipate.

    One thing is for sure, the workplace of the future is far more autonomous and diverse than those we’ve been used to for the last hundred years, the businesses who don’t adapt are those being left behind.

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  • Inflating titles, inflated apirations

    Inflating titles, inflated apirations

    This story first appeared in Smart Company on 19 April 2012.

    “She listed her job on LinkedIn as my ghostwriter,” reflected the journalist about his publishing business’ Gen-Y staff member.

    The journalist’s lament reflects an unexpected corporate risk in social media; that of employees giving themselves grandiose and sometimes damaging job profiles.

    Over the last 20 years, title inflation has been rife in the business world as corporations and government agencies doled out grandiose titles to soothe the egos of fragile management egos.

    So it isn’t surprising that many of us succumb to the temptation to give ourselves a grand title online.

    In the journo’s case a young graduate working as an editor in his publishing business listed herself as his ghostwriter, risking a huge dent to his credibility among other the lizards at the pub or the Quill Awards.

    That business journalist is not alone, in the connected economy what would have been a quaint title on a business card or nameplate is now being advertised to the world.

    Making matters worse, we now have tools like LinkedIn and other social media sites to check out a business’ background and who are the key contacts in an organisation.

    So what your staff call themselves is now important. It can confuse customers, cause internal staff problems (“how come he’s an Executive Group General Manager?”), damage business reputations and quite often put an unexpected workload on a relatively junior employee.

    In your social media policy – which is now essential in any business that employs staff – you need to clarify what titles your people can bestow upon themselves.

    As well as making this clear to new staff, a regular web search on your business that includes all of the popular social media sites should be a regular task.

    Just as economic inflation can hurt your business, so too can uncontrolled title inflation. Watch it isn’t affecting your operations.

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  • Passion and pain

    Passion and pain

    “Don’t buy the hype about following your passions”, is the advice from business writer and entrepreneur Penelope Trunk in her blog post The career passion myth and how it derails you.

    Sonja Lyubomirsky talks about workplace engagement as a result of having control over one’s time and being able to make people feel good. Janitors, she finds, are happiest at work because they can control their workday and they can see immediately how they are helping people. Lawyers, by contrast, are the most universally unhappy, because they have little control over their hours and they are generally dealing with people who hate that they have to hire a lawyer, whatever the lawyer is doing.

    Penelope has a good point and it’s something I encountered in my business with passionate staff – the most committed and dedicated are also those most prone to burn out and depression.

    In the computer business, good technicians have a combination of two character types; the geek and the concierge.

    The concierge attribute like to help people; this the key character trait for successful hospitality and customer service staff.

    Geeks are the garage tinkerers; they enjoy being confronted with a technical issue and fixing it. Nothing makes them happier than being confronted with a tough problem and a successful resolution.

    What I realised in watching computer techs over time is that both personality traits were driven down by the nature of the industry.

    As Penelope points out in her article, lawyers aren’t happy because people don’t want to deal with them; this is common in the repair industries. Customers aren’t happy to see the tech and are suspicious that bills may be being padded out.

    This was particularly true during the spyware epidemic of the early 2000s; often an effective fix involved backing up data, reformatting the system and then rebuilding it. Often the technician’s bill was more than the cost of buying a new computer.

    Making matters worse was often the spyware infection was due to a family member or trusted employee visiting inappropriate websites. Having to explain to a staid matron that her husband was downloading megabytes of hard core pornography is a diplomatic skill in itself.

    Naturally horny husband or frustrated staff member would be on those sites again shortly after the technician’s visit so the freshly cleaned computer would often be infected again and the customer would, understandably, be cranky at the tech for having another expensive call shortly after the first one.

    Along with spyware, it’s common that technology products from big vendors don’t deliver on the flash marketing promises or aren’t as reliable as a customer has a right to expect.

    This would become the technician’s problem again.

    Many of these problems would be outside of the tech’s control which is devastating for one’s inner geek that takes pride in fixing problems.

    All of these factors would eventually grind both the geeks and the concierges down and they would become demoralised over time.

    For the most passionate this would manifest itself in burn out and often depression. In fact, I started feeling this myself and was one of the reasons I had to step away from the PC Rescue business.

    Being passionate about your work is great; but passion and depression are often close together if you feel your love is not being requited.

    As an employer, it’s important to watch those passionate staff members as the risk of burn out is real.

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