Mish: "Crowd-Sourcing" IBM to Cut 3/4 of its Permanent Staff by 2017?

04-27-2010 • GlobalEconomicAnalysis.blogspot.com

Crowd sourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee and outsoucring it to an undefined group of people on a project-by-project basis, in the form of an open call. Firms wishing to follow this model could encourage employees to set up a company with 10 or more colleagues, and buy back their services as and when needed. Threat is Real I will say upfront that I have no idea which is more accurate, the claims by Personnel Today or IBM's denial. That aside, it should be crystal clear that outsourcing is ongoing and a very real threat to a whole gamut of IT professionals. Thus, even if the rumor is not true today, it may easily be true tomorrow. Trend Watching I keep wondering how long it will be before the accounting profession is hit hard by outsourcing. So far, it has hardly been touched. Yet, accounting is a conceptually easy target. I believe the only thing holding back outsourcing accounting jobs is fear that data (account numbers, credit card numbers, proprietary results, etc) falls in the wrong hands. In regards to information technology, every week I receive emails from people who were outsourced or fear being outsourced.