Here is something interested that happened to me today. Someone added me to their phone book on Skype. I wasn’t sure who the person was – other than the name meant it was obviously a tech firm – so I said hello on chat. It turned out to be a firm called GKS Technologies in India.

First, it’s a big surprise to me that anyone would just randomly trawl Skype looking for potential customers to call in locations that just might have some business – will they call everyone in London looking for some IT work? Then, wouldn’t the process of using unsolicited Skype calls like this alienate anyone who might even potentially give them some business? By switching to chat, it also highlighted some pretty dreadful presentation skills on their part.

You can guess what I think of GKS Technologies, but just so you can see what happened, here is the conversation:

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
hello
hello?
you just added me

GKS Technologies
hi

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
hello

GKS Technologies
hi mark
This Is Neha from Mumbai/India

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
hello

GKS Technologies
This is Neha

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
Hello Neha, what can I do?

GKS Technologies
Mark, we offer cost effective web site and software solutions from India, and was wondering if you may be interested in outsourcing your web /software development services to us
are you interested?

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
I'm not sure where you got my details or who you think I am - have you looked at my web site?

GKS Technologies
It’s just an random search performed on Skype

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
Based on what criteria - being in London? I'm just wondering how you found me - you added me to your Skype address book earlier. Was that because I am in the UK?

So, at this point Neha stopped talking to me. Then another Skype user picks up where she left off:

Software & Web Developing Company Based In India
Hi Mark

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
Hello

Software & Web Developing Company Based In India
This is Gulab Nihalani here

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
Hello Gulab

Software & Web Developing Company Based In India
Earlier Neha have had a chat with you on Skype

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
I saw that yes

Software & Web Developing Company Based In India
Mark just to clarify it was purely a random search performed on Skype

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
That's fine. I am just interested in how you found me though if it was random - you mean based on my location then?

Software & Web Developing Company Based In India
Yes, am sorry if you have been disturbed

Last Friday, I was speaking at an ESRC event focused on career migration at Loughborough University. My talk was focused on connecting the discipline associated with outsourcing and the fluidity of the retained organisation in a globally connected world. I stressed a number of points that extended the reach of outsourcing as a business practice into the realm of P2P (peer to peer) systems, social networks, and the open source movement – with a thread connecting them all and describing how work itself will change because of the way we are engaging socially with other people using the internet.

I was really interested in a lecture by Dr MN Ravishankar (Ravi) from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. Ravi was focused on the discourse of innovation and how valuable that is in career progression – his research was undertaken with Professor Laurie Cohen from Loughborough. In short, if employees pretend they are innovative, excited, and wired, then they do better than those who don’t or those who reject the ‘game’ of pretending that they believe in being innovative. As you can imagine, his research findings were full of humorous observations – people finding that the more often they use the word ‘innovation’ in front of their boss, the faster they get promoted. But there was of course a serious side to it – employees managing to maintain some dual sense of belief in knowing what they need to do to succeed, but not really believing in it.

Though Ravi’s talk was grounded in the academic theories of mimicry he really gave a lot of examples from the coalface of an IT services company in India that were fascinating and demonstrated something that many of us in the industry know all too well – that we use too much jargon and arcane language in the IT and outsourcing world.

I’m sure everyone has tried playing ‘buzzword bingo’ before – the game where you bring a list of clichéd management phrases into a meeting and tick them off as these tired phrases are trotted out by the boss. What was really interesting about Ravi’s research though was that he has studied how and why Indian tech companies try to reduce their sense of “Indian-ness” in the market. How employees in the tech sector mimic clients, copying their accent, dress sense, and jargon in speech, and also how most of these employees think that the idea of them ‘innovating’ when the client is specifying exactly what they should do is fanciful – to say the least.

It’s really interesting stuff, particular the idea of outsourcing supplier staff living in this duality of pretending to be innovative, but knowing that it is impossible.

A lot of people and companies still consider social networking tools such as Facebook to be a frivolous waste of time. Yet, work consists of more networking and communication than ever before. The tools are merely reflecting the way we work today, and are becoming an essential part of the working day.

I mention this because there was an interesting post on the discussion board of the Outsourcing Experts Group in Facebook yesterday. Preet Chandhoke, a director of software development firm 01Synergy, posted up his views on the five regions to watch for offshoring in 2009:

• Argentina
• Bulgaria
• China
• Egypt
• Philippines

Preet highlighted his thoughts on the pros and cons of each location and I tend to agree with his views. But one factor I expect to become more important in the coming year is political stability – something Preet mentions with regard to both Egypt and the Philippines.

International terrorism and civil disputes are going to be considered a greater risk than before in the present climate, leading to a greater willingness to explore different options, where before it might have been a straightforward decision to go offshore. Those options might even include getting the work done in your home country by using a smaller company, or just going for a nearshore option. There is a definite increase in unease at having critical components of the supply chain halfway across the world right now.

I received an interesting email from a friend of mine, Gavin Cooney, who runs a company in Dublin called Learnosity. It is focused on using the telephone for tests and exams, such as taking an oral language test with the telephone instead of with the teacher in a school.

Gavin is trying to set up a call centre in India. It’s designed to connect job candidates to people who can test their English language skills on the phone. Now, in most countries this would be a pretty easy thing to set up. There are plenty of virtual call centre services such as Voxbone that could be set up extremely quickly.

However he has a problem trying to get any service together because there are questions over the legality of some kinds of IP services using voice over IP (VoIP) in India. Take a look at this blog entry for an opinion - http://andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwatch/2004/08/india_cracks_do.html.

Isn’t it strange that India presents such an advanced face in the contact centre industry, yet unrestricted VoIP is not an option?

I am speaking today at a conference in Prague. I’m not on until just after 1pm, but I thought I would arrive promptly at 8am so I could follow the talks in the morning. So I got up and had breakfast early, listening to BBC Radio 5 in my hotel and was pleased to hear my editor at Computing, Bryan Glick, talking about broadband use in the UK while I was munching on my toast in the Czech Republic, thanks to the wonders of the BBC iPlayer – exactly the thing Bryan was talking about.

I walked to the Czech National Bank, avoiding the morning traffic, and took my place in the audience. Then the lectures started and I discovered that the entire morning is going to be in Czech and only switches to English once I am involved later in the day!

I’m certainly not a little Englander, insisting on the use of business English everywhere I go, but I have to confess that I only know a few words of Czech. At least if it was French then I could follow most of the debate, but I am afraid that I am reduced to blogging while people speak right now…

Do you remember studying a language at school? I certainly remember having to study French and being forced to attempt to take oral tests of my linguistic ability by lining up with other students and having to converse with my teacher at a time that suited her. That’s pretty much the normal way oral tests are performed – there is always a bottleneck with many more students than teachers and a requirement to conduct the test at exactly the same time – with all the problems of keeping students who have completed the test away from those who are still waiting in line.

So I was interested to talk to Gavin Cooney, chief executive of Irish firm Learnosity, this week at the Assessment Tomorrow conference in Bangalore and learned that there is a completely new way that companies such as his can process oral tests that works far better for both student and teacher.

Learnosity uses a very innovative system that works using mobile phones and instant messaging (IM) tools such as Jabber. Kids can call a special number on the mobile phone and go through a security process to identify who they are before answering a series of questions, which are recorded and analysed. Similarly they can login to the IM system and chat on various topics, with moderators viewing the conversation and advising in real-time, to keep them in the target language. Though the system doesn’t use biometric security at present, that kind of voice recognition technology is in the pipeline.

Students can then podcast their own response to how the test went so there is some immediate feedback from the student, followed by a rapid analysis of how they actually performed in the test. In Ireland, the system is used to test Irish language skills at school and students and teachers there report that the use of IT and mobile phone makes the whole process easier and with a far higher level of interaction – though in some cases Learnosity has found that the teachers need a bit of guidance on some of the technology! On an additional plus side for Learnosity, Gavin found that his own Irish has improved since he started delivering these tests for the Irish government.

Learnosity is running high-school exams in this way for several governments now in Ireland and other European countries and as I spoke to Gavin he was en route to Australia to work on a series of tests there. It’s a nice time of year to be going down under.

In Australia they offer online testing for many more subjects than just languages and the New South Wales schools board has a very interactive web site that allows students to practice and test themselves in advance of the real exams. More than four million students have tried the practice tests on this web site and Learnosity found that the experience of building the practice environment allowed them to build an even more robust infrastructure for the live testing environment.

One of the amusing aspects of this is that Gavin’s company can observe when and how students are practising for tests. It’s obvious that most students cram for hours the day before an exam and relax through the weekends immediately prior to exams. We all know this, because we did it ourselves, but it’s funny to see the hard data produced by the system.

This whole idea of outsourcing the assessment of students whether for languages or other subjects is certainly a growth area. Computer-based testing has moved a long way from the days of multiple choice tests and given the advantages of this style of testing such as reliability, equality, and transparency, most schools in Australia now prefer testing in this way.

Learnosity has clearly thought about the entire process of testing in great detail. They can cope with visually-impaired kids, physically-disabled kids, dyslexic kids, and even high-school kids who need to take a break from the test to breast-feed! Their environment is very impressive – Gavin claims that they designed it to work for “completely blind Linux lovers”, the aim being that if they can get their system working perfectly for such demanding users then able-bodied Windows users are easy to please. The issue of inclusiveness is a serious one though. All kids need access to the exams and so it is not possible to build a system that only caters for 95 per cent of users – it has to work for everyone.

Education and assessment is an area of strong growth in outsourcing and the normal issues of quality delivery are of far greater importance than in regular BPO. When a firm is delivering exams to kids it is absolutely critical that the service works every time – to fail could not only cause a problem for the child taking the exam, but it would probably blow up into a political issue as irate parents call radio talk shows to berate the government for saving a few dollars with online exams. It goes to show that outsourcing could become a political issue in many more ways that just the argument of ‘vanishing jobs’ alone.

When I see things like Matt Harding’s video of him dancing around the world it makes me think ‘Wow. How on earth did he think of doing that and how could something similar be applied to the companies I work with to help them reach out to new customers?’ After all, he has over five million hits on YouTube alone for the video; now add in Google videos, Yahoo, MySpace… that’s a lot of eyeballs.

However, my experience in general of companies adopting Web 2.0 has not been positive. Most are caught up in a world in which they have control over what is released about them and their services. Like a despotic government controlling what the press can say, modern service companies that present themselves as the ideal partner, exciting, innovative and flexible – all recoil in horror when presented with some ideas for reaching customers that go beyond the norm.

So everyone is working on creating corporate blogs? Well, my experience is that the first thing people are concerned about is the uncontrollable nature of the blog environment. What if the reader comments say something negative about us? What if the competition starts making a point of commenting? What if the chief executive can’t spell – shouldn’t we run everything through three levels of editing first to check grammar and adherence to the corporate line first?

And what about other interactive environments such as Flickr, MySpace, or YouTube? I recently arranged for punk legends Buzzcocks to play a 1977-2007 celebration gig at the University of London. They agreed to give a talk in the theatre pre-gig on the relevance of punk and youth culture in 2007. Now, as Buzzcocks were probably the first band to create their own label – and therefore the creators of the indie movement – I thought the connection with bands of today using MySpace to usurp the record labels was so strong that a corporate sponsor wanting to reach a youth audience would be easy to find. However, it proved harder than I thought – all the companies I have good connections to thought I was nuts to suggest that they should sponsor a rock concert. So although I had the band on board with the idea, I couldn’t go ahead with it. No points for forward thinking and the potential advantage of being seen in front of 1,200 of the best and brightest young people in London then.

One of my own companies is using YouTube in an interesting way, but then that is because I gave them the idea and I don’t immediately benefit from giving away my ideas to them, apart from them hopefully doing better as a result! Take a look here.

I have discussed the idea of using YouTube with a number of the outsourcing service providers. I thought that it would be a great way to present a young and funky (hey, this is Web 2.0!) and global image – just what many of them are striving for. The problem I kept hitting was a fear of people uploading spoof videos that might reflect negatively on the brand. Oh well, whatever happened to the old adman’s saying (apologies to Oscar Wilde) that “all publicity is good publicity?” Is the fear of talking about outsourcing still so powerful that companies would rather lurk in the shadows than enter a brave new world?

In my last blog entry, I was thinking about the changes in the way companies need to represent themselves, because of the internet and how it has created an entirely new world full of potential. There are so many new business ideas floating around now and the barrier to entry is extremely low. This really is an important consideration in the world of outsourced services, because outsourcing is all about slotting into the supply chain of the purchasing organisation and as service companies become more and more sophisticated in utilising the internet as a delivery platform, we will see a shift downwards from the FTSE 100 using strategic sourcing to much smaller outfits.

In fact, as I mentioned in the last blog, the ability to seek out individual free agents for specific ongoing or short-term projects where the internet has facilitated a global search for exactly the right person, has the potential to change the way any of us work. It could even change the nature of what we think of as a company today. We are already talking today about outsourcing as a change in the way that companies operate. The strategy of core competence described by Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad in the early 1990s (or even Charles Handy’s Shamrock theory from the 1980s) really has come of age now, yet how much further can it go? The idea at present is that a company can maintain a small core of management and then employ experts via outsourcing to perform manufacture, marketing, public relations, advertising… the list goes on and this theory has become the orthodox view on strategy in our present age. Yet, does a company need to operate this way at all? Perhaps the notion of permanent employment by a single employer is about to go the way of the Dodo?

What if we had to justify our existence at work everyday because we are getting paid on a daily basis, with an almost-perfect market allowing the employer to seek out others to fill our role – so they always have the best team on the job at any particular moment? That’s a scary thought and I would love to hear what Lucy Kellaway at the FT thinks about it. It’s especially worrying for those who quite enjoy the snug security of a permanent role in a safe organisation. The final-salary pension (remember those?), the ability to take it easy now and then when a hangover prevents too much effort, the regularity of knowing that the bank account will be boosted on the 25th of the month, every month. That’s the safe vision of permanent employment enjoyed by some, but the reality for most people is that even permanent jobs have been less than permanent for some time now.

The perfect market offering a way of tapping into an almost infinite pool of resource is also a nice idea in theory, purely from the perspective of economic efficiency, but given that humans are social animals and need some form of environment around us to function best, the idea that we will all be beating each other up on a daily basis for work seems unlikely – for now.

However, if we were going to look around for the best individual resource at present then where would you look? There is no really general employment “exchange” at present, other than some specific web sites such as Rentacoder or eLance. For the past few years I have put my eBay user rating on my CV – my 100 per cent record hopefully a demonstration of my personal behaviour over hundreds of transactions, yet that is not quite good enough to demonstrate my suitability for work in a particular role. Most employers make an assumption of honesty when they offer you a contract. The only places that might be considered appropriate (at present) for demonstrating the value of an individual to the world might be the social networking sites such as Myspace, Bebo, or even Flickr and YouTube – where credibility is earned through the content an individual creates.

If you want a really good example of this, and one that is presented as such in my new book, then take a look at YouTube and look out for the videos posted by a British girl who posts under the ID Cutiemish. Michelle Lam is 18, from Kent, and has been posting regular videos based mainly on her thoughts or ideas – with a few bits of song and dance thrown in (can you believe it, she really likes Elvis). It might not sound like much – and we are not even talking about the usual internet seediness here – but she has attracted millions of viewers.

It could be argued that Cutiemish edits her videos really well, or just has some original and fun thoughts (Angus the orange anyone?) and has a fan base all hanging on for the next instalment in her life. But it’s unlikely that she could attract such a following – remember we are talking about millions here - without having some talent for performing and editing. If I worked in the BBC, or in A&R for a music company, then I’d be scouting what some of these YouTube kids are up to because some of them have real talent. Michelle is already going to appear in a Channel 4 movie scheduled for broadcast later this year, bringing the Old Testament book of Exodus into modern-day Margate – and conveniently titled ‘Exodus’.

Although Cutiemish will probably end up in the performing arts, she is a clear example of my point that we will probably all need to become our own personal brand in a future where workers from across the world can compete with each other. So if you don’t yet have the video-editing skills of Cutiemish then I guess you need to take a personal audit of where you really feel that you can compete – with anyone, anywhere - even if your skills are more suited to hardware performance than stage performance.

One of the key changes we are all facing with the IT industry is the concept of knowledge - or skills - being globally available in an accessible market, a level playing field. With the rise and rise of the internet over the past decade a platform has been created, a new public utility that can offer a delivery mechanism for the companies of today and those of tomorrow who are delivering things we have not yet even thought of.

When Thomas Friedman updated his multimillion-selling book ‘The World is Flat’, his focus was on this idea that many of us are not yet prepared for this change. We are hide-bound to the past and the idea that our competition is the other guy or company down the road. Friedman sees the change as a personalisation of competition using the analogy that in earlier times we saw nation states competing for dominance, followed by major corporations, and now individuals can peddle their skills via the internet to a global audience.

I can see what Friedman means. I have my own personal web site and I use it to promote my own writing and consulting. It’s like a shop window where people can see what I do, and if they like it then they might consider hiring me. But things have moved well beyond personal web sites. There are people offering their services through peer-to-peer social networks and companies founding their own competitive offering on the peer-to-peer model, allowing the internet to be the driver of an entirely new form of business transaction that was not possible before this level of connectivity.

These new business models will either help companies to embrace the concept of global partnerships and outsourcing, or they will kill off those who fail to see that the client engagement model has changed. The business-to-business model (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) organisations are blending and merging and utilising the concepts of the social network to gain online credibility.

Take a look at some examples. Zopa offers a deposit and loan service, much like a building society or bank, but different in the way that those prepared to place money on deposit are far more actively engaged in how that money is then carved up and loaned to those seeking to borrow. It would probably be possible to arrange a one-to-one loan service where someone is prepared to invest £5,000 and this goes to someone seeking a £5,000 loan, but by spreading each deposit across a number of borrowers the risk of default is reduced.

So what’s the difference between this internet model and the old 'Building and Loan' operation we see every Christmas when watching repeats of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’? Well, by connecting the buyer and seller directly and just acting as the utility that makes this possible then it should be possible to create a real win-win for both. Look at the difference between the rates that a bank will pay on money that is placed on deposit and the rates they charge a borrower. Now, if you can connect the saver and borrower directly and agree on a rate for deposits that is higher than a bank or building society would pay, but less that would normally be charged for a loan, then both parties win.

Foreign exchange specialists FXA World use this concept to their own advantage in the same way. Look at the huge difference in foreign exchange rates when you buy or sell any foreign currency, that’s called the spread and for a good reason too because the banks make so much cash from this that they can afford to spread large end-of-year bonuses to their traders for continuing to rob the consumer. The Post Office is probably worse than the banks as those cute little ants talk about commission-free currency and then take more from the customer by charging an enormous spread (and they still try selling you a life insurance policy on top of the foreign exchange). FXA World connects buyers of currency to sellers and charges a minimal commission on the trade. So if you have pounds and want dollars then the system will find you someone with dollars who wants pounds and you can agree on a price that is between the buy and sell price a bank will offer – so again, both sides win thanks to the peer-to-peer possibilities offered by the internet.

I have to declare an interest, because I have owned shares in FXA World since just after the company was formed a couple of years ago, but regardless of any potential conflict of interest in bigging-up this organisation, the point is that companies like this – offering a way of connecting a buyer directly to a seller – are all taking the model perfected by eBay and applying it to new markets and services. There is no end to the number of examples where this model could totally change the entire marketplace.

Zopa (I don’t have any connection to them at all, but I like their business model!) and FXA World are just acting as a new form of utility and it is becoming essential for every company to consider the implications of this possibility. Just imagine what might be possible if you could employ the best-of-breed service supplier for every service in your supply chain?