One of the interesting developments in business is that companies can and routinely do farm out whole functionalities. If you are the Buyer and buy from the Seller, a third party will probably be involved in that transaction in some way. I bought some software I needed Saturday. In the process I managed to mangle my credit card information—not once but three times. Finally I got it right and the transaction went through. Then the phone rang. The man on the other end asked for Mr. or Mrs. Durang, which is a botch of our name, but I just let that go and said, “I’m one of them.” It turned out that it was my bank on the line, well, kind of. The man said that somebody was trying to use my credit card and behaved suspiciously. The amount was $36.50. I said: “Well, that was me, just a minute ago.” We got that problem cleared up. In that process I discovered two things. One was that my seller, the software house, used a third party to handle its payment processes. Next I discovered that my caller was not an employee of my bank but the employee of a third party my bank had retained to handle suspicious credit card activity. The outfit calling me worked for lots of banks…
This sort of thing predates the web. I remember once handing our payroll function to a third party, a payroll service. In the process I recaptured some of my Saturdays. That was before the Internet grew mighty. But this kind transfer of functions for a fee depends very much on rapid and accurate data transfer from point to point. He who targets our communications systems at this level could do serious damage to our economy. A while back, tracing down some strange anomaly or another, I managed to get hold of charts for a region showing the Internet connections in an amazingly detailed way, with important nodes very easily pinpointed on the ground—and what surprised me was that many of these nodes were not in major metro areas at all.
If I happen across that very strange information again, I might show a glimpse of it—or perhaps not. Some nutcase might see it and get ideas. As for me personally, I’m glad that I carry my liver, kidneys, pancreas, etc., always with me wherever I go.
Filed under: Communications | Tagged: Distributed Functions, Outsourcing
[...] Bodies with Distributed Organs [...]
It is an interesting thing to contemplate, this division of labor at the organizational level. Should ECDI end up working on IDCH we’ll be dealing with this aspect of organizational life quite a lot.
It all reminds me of some observations we had way back in 2001 while working on the Social Trends & Indicators — USA series. There is a sort of simple logic which compels one to believe that by centralizing a function in one place that it can be done more efficiently and thus at lower cost. And, to some extent that is true. But, there is another side to the matter, which is the thinning of an organization, a process that can’t help but make it more fragile, more vulnerable.
So, how to determine the right balance?
It is, of course, difficult to do a cost-benefit analysis when one must compare hard costs to intangible, more squishy costs…
And then there’s another issue. I’m not sure it is applicable here but perhaps… I’d need to think through it further.
The “it” that needs further thought is this, when gathering information, for example, to write up an essay on X, you may be inclined to ask somebody else to get that info together, print out the most important parts and highlight the really key tidbits. You’re thinking, lets divide this task.
Writing the essay with this lovely collection of information made by somebody else may work well. But, writing it after doing that research yourself works even better.
Much is absorbed in the process of collecting the background materials, sifting through them, selecting what is and is not important, becoming at home in the landscape of the topic at hand. Here, a division of labor probably doesn’t add to efficiency.
And yet, this observation assumes certain things, like the availability of lovely, searchable archives of information…. In fact, the labor of making those archives is a part of the research labor, a part that was quite efficiently split off, divided. So, even here, the division of labor at some level did make a lot of sense.
Levels, that’s the key… I think. But, I ramble…
I really like the imagery of bodies with divided organs!