Let’s take a journey through labor beginning in the early 1950s. At that time, the large American multinational firm hired Americans with High School or college degrees and put them to work. 40 years later those kids retired and their employer paid for their retirement. People may have been paid every two weeks, but effectively the unit of labor was an entire career. You were expected to work from your 20s to your 60s for one company. By the late 1980s the system was becoming antiquated. The major innovation was the 401k (made legal in 1978) which made it possible for people to switch jobs once they became vested. The unit of work was reduced to a handful of years. In the late 1990s outsourcing began to take shape, along with a growth in contract work in the United States. The unit of work was reduced to months.
Enter CloudCrowd. It was confirmed yesterday that the startup raised $5.1M. As their name implies, the company attempts to put labor in the cloud (LaaS). This is a stupid name and is focused on a marketing term (cloud) that I believe will fade from prominence like “digital” and “onDemand” before it. The concept however, seems inevitable to me. People will one day complete units of work measured in days, hours or even minutes instead of years or lifetimes. Whether CloudSource can make it or not as a company is not a question of IF their idea is sound, its a question of WHEN corporate America will be ready for it. This transition will rely on three things:
- Advances in the health care system. Say what you want about nationalized healthcare, but linking your job to your coverage is going to hinder business and soon. Without a fix here we may end up artificially delaying reductions in the size of the unit of labor. In this case artificial means, “not in accordance with the natural evolution of labor.” In my mind, there is a real danger that we’ll have this inefficiency, but other countries will not.
- Advancements in manufacturing and R&D. While this transition is slowly starting to occur in many parts of the organization, there are two definite laggards; manufacturing and R&D. Manufacturing lags because of its reliance on physical locations and predictability of workforce (labor unions are also potentially a problem here). R&D lags because of its reliance on long periods of research and prototyping. Both have made some progress (see a previous post on open innovation), but we will need further advancement to make these “cloud sourceable.”
- Some further standardization of the qualification and evaluation of individuals for these tasks. Simply asking what degree someone has or years of experience is adequate for determining who to interview, but it’s a long way from being adequate for rapidly sourcing tasks.
Whatever happens it should be an interesting transition to watch over the next 20 or so years,
