One of the charges levelled against companies that use outsourcing as a part of their operational strategy is that they ‘care less’ about their employees. This is usually a bit of a spurious claim in my opinion. The team working on technical support in the back office of a local authority or insurance company have a career path that is about as limited as a singer who wins the X-Factor.

Technology work in an organisation such as IBM, Accenture, Atos Origin, and other major service companies, offers those with technology skills a genuine career path and training in various business domains. This can be one of the really positive outcomes from an outsourcing deal, some of those ‘basement’ teams start getting some real training and investment in their future.

But, when I was browsing MySpace with the intention of seeing what IT service companies are doing about using the internet for information sharing and connecting their staff together, I found something really interesting. The networking and collaborative possibilities of the internet don’t have to be harnessed from the boardroom for the initiatives to be useful. There are a lot of people out there who understand the connective power of the internet a lot better than their companies do and are doing it for themselves.

A Californian college student and former Starbucks employee, Andrew Gonis, created a MySpace group named ‘Starbucks HQ’ in 2005 – now he has over 4,000 members. The group was not created or endorsed by the coffee company itself, Gonis wanted to create an unofficial environment where colleagues could connect with their international peers and share experience and ideas. That’s over 4,000 staff members actively swapping ideas about how to improve what their company does, without ever being coerced into it.

I sent Andrew an email to ask what he thought about the group. He told me: “I think there is no way you can go wrong when you connect employees who share the same passion for your company. When you put people like that together, their passions ignite and they feed off one another. MySpace and similar sites ‘humanise’ your brand or company. Rather than having to look at a corporate dot com, the viewer is on equal ground with the company because MySpace is something they can identify with. I love the company. Even though I am not employed by Starbucks at the moment, I still feel connected for some reason.”

It’s true that not every company will be comfortable with an employee network being created on the public internet, generally for security and because of the ease of infiltration by the competition, so there must be a unique opportunity here for a new outsourced service – social networks that combine the security of the corporation with the rich functionality of the Web 2.0 tools on the internet.