the ki work blog

Now available: The Ki Work Team Widget

Hot off the development press we now have a Team Widget. You can now easily embed your Ki Work teams into your website and blog, to give your site visitors an instant idea of who you are working with. Perfect for teams of consultants and distributed virtual organizations.

Here's an example using the Ki Work operations team:
It's still very much version 1.0, but let us know how we can improve it for your needs, and we'll do our best to adapt it.

For more teams on Ki Work, check out the team search section.

Aviation Consultancy flies high using Ki Work teams to get off the ground

IAGBlog - a series of podcasts and blogs about the aviation and travel industry - recently featured Martin Hedley in a piece about using Ki Work's team building features for high-value consultancy work.

Martin is currently leading the way in using Ki Work to build multiple 'micro-businesses', or small teams of consultants to handle niche projects in the aviation industry.

As the IAGBlog puts it, "Martin Hedley, COO of Sharpresouces.com is creating a novel offering for the travel industry with virtual consulting teams made up of established experts. Planning on offering top tier consulting work at 50% off regular costs, he expects to have a busy year. Headhunters, talent and especially firms needing help pay attention to this idea."

There are countless opportunities for team creation using the Ki Work platform. Check out Martin's and other teams in the team search section. Or create your own teams for free by becoming an Expert in a specialist category.

Listen to the full IAGBlog interview here

Dog Days for Local News

Hardly a day goes by without a new story about another struggling newspaper. The US has had it particularly bad recently, with the high-profile closure of the 150 year old Rocky Mountain News, and even the San Francisco Chronicle is struggling.

In the UK, things aren't much better. The Independent posted an article today highlighting the crisis in local news. It paints a pretty bleak picture. "Some 60 regional papers have closed in the last year. Guardian Media Group... has this week embarked on a bloodbath of job cutting, slashing 150 jobs in the North-west, and closing offices in Accrington, Ashton, Macclesfield, Oldham, Rochdale, Rossendale, Salford and Wilmslow. GMG, which publishes The Guardian national newspaper, also this week cut a further 95 jobs from its titles in Surrey and Berkshire, reducing its flagship paper for the region, the Reading Evening Post, from a five-day to a twice-weekly publication."

The future for printed local news looks pretty grim to say the least. But as that classic over-used (and probably totally inaccurate) Chinese proverb goes, in every crisis, there's great opportunity. And especially in how digital media can play a part in solving this problem.

The Guardian's Open Platform is certainly a step in the right direction, leading the way in making news data open to developers. There's also local aggregation services like Hophive. which makes local info easily available (if you happen to live in London that is).

But what happens to the art of newspaper journalism, and the stories from local courts, police and community parishes that were traditionally supplied by skilled, trained writers? Are we facing the end of local news as we used to know it?

We hope not, and have been working on a solution, using the ki work team building platform to help journalists easily build editorial teams. We welcome anyone interested to get in touch and get involved.

Journalists team up online to take on newspapers

Recently ki work introduced a team-building function. In this post I'm looking at the way it could be used by colleagues in my former industry.

Newspapers are suffering from the current economic crisis every bit as much as banks, car plants and construction. Already hit by falling circulation, declining advertising revenue and crippling debt the credit crunch could be the fatal blow for many publishing groups.

But newspapers won't begin to close until there's been a massive amount of cost cutting. Skilled journalistic jobs are being lost in increasing numbers, but the way managements are going about saving money is certainly not good for quality and may not even be cost effective. To understand the challenge and how ki work could help requires a basic knowledge of newspaper production works

A simple introduction to newspaper editorial production

When most people pick up a newspaper they probably neither know nor particularly care how it was put together. It's a complex process and one where by-lined journalists may play less part than you might think.

Named writers are only one of the many sources of content that are brought together to create a newspaper and nowadays its associated website. There'll be classified and display advertisements; copy from agencies such as Reuters; press releases and photographs from a variety of sources.  All this material has to be brought together to create a coherent product ready for printing or the web.

Although job titles do vary from newspaper to newspaper and from country to country the basic organization remains the same. Headed by an overall editor and editors who are responsible for sections, teams of specialists called 'sub-editors' in the UK and 'copy editors' in the US, polish and pull together material to create a coherent whole.

Copy editors or sub-editors will generally be responsible for: fact checking; writing headlines and picture captions; ensuring text complies with the house style of the paper and pointing out possible legal issues. Most importantly they'll improve copy from reporters who may be great at getting stories, but aren't so good at writing them. And editing also means cutting what may be thousands of words from different sources to fit the hundreds of words of  finite space on a newspaper page.

Conventional outsourcing is less than perfect

Despite the skill involved , editorial  production is a candidate for outsourcing. Reporters aren't. Even though they may work mostly on the phone, reporters still need to meet contacts and go to press conferences. Production journalists work at a desk and theoretically that could be anywhere, even Australia or India.

London's Daily Telegraph has already outsourced production of its travel pages to Fairfax in Australia. Other  groups are centralising their production so that one “subbing factory” provides services for all the newspapers.

Of course journalists aren't happy about these developments. They point out that editing really requires local and specialist knowledge. It's easy to make howlers and miss nuances even if the grammar and spelling are technically correct.

Outsourcing this way doesn't optimise savings for newspaper companies either. It's always possible to find somewhere with lower rates of pay. Conventional outsourcing uses an intermediary who needs to make a profit and cover the cost of premises, communications technology and staff. A rule of thumb is that salaries will only account for half the charges.

Virtual outsourcing is better all round

The alternative is “virtual outsourcing” which in this case is essentially a high-falutin' way of describing newspaper production experts working from home. Their costs are negligible because they probably already have the essential tools of the trade, a computer and an internet connection. They could even save money because they won't have to travel to work.

Until recently the problem was that the benefits and savings from virtual outsourcing were generally theoretical. If individuals have to be hired and managed centrally the savings from having them working from home will be minimised.

The ki work alternative is to create self-organised teams, initially quite probably composed of people who have already worked together. Later it could develop to bring in others that team members have met offline or online. Teams are intended to be agile, fluid and flexible so they can involve the most appropriate professionals to complete a project.

In my next posting I'll look in more detail how a team can be set up in ki work to bid for the production of newspaper sections. This is only one application of ki work's team building function click here to find out more.

Meet the new capitalists

Since the credit crunch started the phrase 'New Capitalism' has appeared with increasing frequency from the mouths of journalists, pundits and politicians. What does it mean? What are the implications of 'new capitalism' for ki workers?

From my research all I can say is 'new capitalism' is best defined as 'old capitalism'. Yep. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, as Pete Townsend wrote.

The fate of the term was sealed at a meeting on 8 January which brought together French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and, er, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a politician as sorely missed as George W Bush will surely be. 

I'm sorry, but when three such enthusiastic supporters of unfettered free markets are suddenly converted to 'new capitalism' it brings out the skeptic in me. (And I should add all the views expressed are my own and are not necessarily those of ki work.) 

Out of gas

These politicians sound too much like the board of a car company trying to get another year's sales out of an aging model. So they add some chrome, different shaped headlamps and an upgraded stereo system. Now it's 'new'. But under the chrome it's the same old gas-guzzling, inefficient, outmoded vehicle.

'New capitalism' is a way of describing the desperate measures that are being applied to keep the sinking globalized economy afloat. The fond hope of Merkel, Sarkozy and that English bloke is that sufficient patches can be applied to the ship of market capitalism so that it will appear to sail as well as it did a year or so ago. Of course, there's no chance of that.

Their form of 'new capitalism' has as much chance of success as Mikhail Gorbachev's new communism a couple of decades ago.

As politicians they do have an impossible task. They cannot say what everybody else knows. We have no idea what is going to happen to the global economy. Change is the only certainty.

Corporate death

That's why I'm so enthusiastic about ki work and believe me I'm not one of nature's natural evangelists. I'm at heart a cynical old hack ready to see the worst in most things. But I do see the future of my livelihood is through flexibility, adaptability and low capital outlay. 

We may not know where the economic system is heading, but we can see some of the forces shaping it. I've been impressed by the work of Harvard's Umair Haque , Director of the Havas Media Lab. He talks of the change from symmetric to asymmetric competition. To over-simplify, capitalism used to revolve around competition between corporate behemoths. Think General Motors versus Ford. Brands such as Coca-Cola took decades to build. Then along comes Google, achieving its position of power and brand with next to no marketing and without attempting to destroy its competition.

I'm slightly disappointed that he chose Google as an example, not that it's inaccurate, but it is another corporation even if it has a very different structure and philosophy compared with its predecessors. Far more interesting to me is the way small businesses can now successfully challenge and beat the big guys. 

The strength of the old corporations lay in their size. Now that's what holds them back. Encumbered by debt, real estate and old working practices, they cannot compete with adaptable, flexible and relatively debt-free small businesses.

Join the revolution

That's where ki work comes in. A team of professionals each working from home, linked to colleagues anywhere in the world via the internet, has negligible overheads. As a result they can beat conventional bricks-and-mortar companies on both quality and cost. 

Visit ki work's main site and see how you can use our online marketplace to fulfill your project requirements or create your own virtual business as a ki worker. 

How Workforce Management magazine predicts glowing future for ki work

New year's the time for 'experts' to make predictions. They're all pretty gloomy. There's no debate as to whether the cup's half full or half empty. Instead optimists hope for a refill in 2010 while pessimists or, perhaps, realists expect a longer wait. That probably makes 'sobriety' one of the key words for 2009.

Fortunately ki work offers a home-brew alternative to fill your own (virtual) glass or better to share a pitcher. Who wants to work (or drink) alone? The good news is ki work's collaborative, work-sharing, guerrilla outsourcing model is finding friends everywhere, even if they don't know it yet.

The leading HR magazine and website Workforce Management lists 60 top predictions, most of which are in total accord with the ki work model. In fact there's so little to contradict the ki work philosophy that it makes my job hard. 

Normally I'd point readers to some small nuggets that back up my argument. This time I can only recommend you read the whole article. Believe me, it's fascinating.

Indeed, the one key prediction that writer Ed Frauenheim picks out to introduce the article is: "There will be more emphasis on collaboration and using technology to support it." Well, of course.

Another couple of quotes I'd pick out are:

"The talent market will look a lot more like eBay than Monster or Yahoo HotJobs."

And:

"The concept of offshoring will cease to exist. Talent will exist globally and companies will go where the talent is. The purpose will not be to get the lowest-cost labor, but rather the highest-quality talent."

There are a couple of key points where I think the article is fundamentally wrong because it assumes most conventional business organizations will be agile enough to cope with the seismic changes that are taking place. I believe that most current business models will prove unsustainable. (But then if I was writing an article for HR professionals I'm not sure if I'd want to be the one to tell them their profession was on the verge of being swept aside by the tide of history.)

My other disagreement with the Workforce Management article is it's postulating these changes ten years away in 2018.  The dramatic shifts in the way we work are going to happen an awful lot sooner than that. Sign up free for ki work and see how you can be part of the work revolution.

So what have gorillas got to do with business process outsourcing?

Image via Wikipedia

So what is ki work "virtual business process outsourcing" (or VBPO for short)? Is ki work "collaborative capitalism"? Is ki work "guerrilla outsourcing"? (That's as distinct from "gorilla outsourcing" which is monkey business.) Or is there a better way to describe ki work?

I know you might say: "It's all just words. What matters is the ki work concept." But words are very important to me, not just because they're how I make my living.

Say I meet somebody in a bar, a cafe or whatever and they ask me what I'm doing. I reply that I'm editing a blog for ki work. They'll ask: "What's that?" I could say: "Oh, it's a platform for virtual business process outsourcing." Maybe it's just the company I keep, but instantly the by-now uninterested party would suddenly remember an urgent appointment, spot somebody they just had to speak to or develop an impossibly weak bladder.

Do you see my difficulty?

The erstwhile CEO and founder of ki work Michael Wolff tells me this isn't really a problem as people in the world of outsourcing talk of nothing but BPO or VBPO (obviously that's "business process outsourcing" or "virtual business process outsourcing). Apart from the way it doesn't make outsourcerers sound as if they're the most exciting people to spend time with, the terms and acronyms are probably as clear as mud to the average ki worker. Hey, until a few months ago my eyes would have glazed over.

Michael and the other top ki workers have come up with a couple of other suggestions, most recently "guerrilla outsourcing". This is actually a very descriptive term for ki work.

Guerrilla warfare involves small groups of lightly armed, highly mobile combatants challenging better-equipped, but less mobile, conventional armies. Ki work enables small organizations of highly-flexible online workers to take on large corporations and win. 

While I can absolutely see the parallels, there's something on an emotional level that I find slightly uncomfortable about the phrase "guerrilla outsourcing". The problem I have is that I don't feel as if I'm some sort of successor to Che Image via WikipediaGuevara as a I sit banging away at my keyboard. 

In the same vein I always laughed behind the backs of people who called themselves "road warriors". A software salesman - not many women want to class themselves as "warriors" - dressed in chinos and a polo shirt is not Mad Max. Ditch the laptop and the mid-range Ford, get a spear and a chariot, then I'll believe you're a "road warrior".

As I said, my reaction is totally emotional and irrational.

This brings me to the other description of ki work as "collaborative capitalism". I've blogged before about how ki work represents part of the future as old-style managerial capitalism falls apart.  

I love the idea of the internet providing new ways to work where we collaborate online, across national borders, to undercut and replace traditional corporations. Certainly big isn't always beautiful any more. 

The benefits of economies of scale are disappearing in the digital world. Who needs a big office building with a sophisticated computer network and thousands of employees when your big business can be undercut by a bunch of homeworkers linked by the internet? 

So again, "collaborative capitalism" offers a good description of ki work, but as a term it comes with baggage. What I mean is, in a strangely contradictory way, some people seem to believe that if you talk about "capitalism " you must be a communist. It's nonsense of course, but it's hard to escape the emotional subconscious impact of words.

So how do we describe ki work: collaborative capitalism, guerrilla outsourcing or virtual business process outsourcing? Perhaps you can offer a better suggestion. I'd certainly be interested to hear what you have to say.

Here is tomorrow's news

Image via Wikipedia

The demise of newspapers will be a sad loss for local communities, democracy and journalists. (Okay I know the last is a little selfish but it has been my profession for too long so I have a vested interest.) But seriously, papers at their best do hold local politicians to account and they provide some sort of social cohesion. Without them it'll be difficult to find out what local sports teams are up to, what's playing at the multiplex and even who has died in the neighborhood.

Although as I said in my last ki work blog posting I believe traditional printed newspapers cannot survive or even reinvent themselves I do think there's room for a new type of local news source which uses traditional skills. To show how it could work I'm going to develop a theoretical model here.

Local news reinvented

We'll start with a journalist called Jack who has been laid off when the newspaper he was working for closed down. Fortunately he's got a bit of cash in the bank from his final pay-off to cover not so much the start-up costs of his new business but to enable him to eat while he develops revenue streams.

As a reporter and a resident he'll have developed good local contacts including with the police, churches, schools, politicians, shopkeepers and all the people who keep a community running. He might not have a printing press, but he does have a PC and an internet connection so putting their stories online is pretty simple.

Using blogging software he creates a local website covering the same things as his old paper. It is a great deal of work as even so-called 'user-generated content' has to be chased and often delicately rewritten. He can't afford to alienate contributors.

One thing he probably won't have to worry about is search engine optimization. As his audience is geographically focused publicizing the site is a combination of word-of-mouth, flyers and ads in stores. In that context Google ranking doesn't matter too much.

Undercutting the corporations

The central point about his whole operation is that it's cheap. He already has a PC and broadband. Hosting his site costs less than $10 a month. His investment isn't cash, but time. It's a sea change from his old newspaper with hundreds of staff, expensive offices, printing and distribution to pay for. Image by ~jjjohn~ via Flickr

But old papers face one challenge in common: finding revenue. The easiest way to monetize a site is through contextual advertising such as Google's AdSense. There are also thousands of affiliate schemes which give website owners a percentage of sales income from the likes of Amazon. These are simple schemes to set up, but they're unlikely to give Jack a living wage.

A more effective way of earning money is to sell ads and sponsorship to specific businesses. This is not an easy task for a journalist. The problem comes in retaining any vestige of independence when speaking to a local business. Is it advertising that he's after or a story? And will an advertiser get editorial preference?

The ki work model

Image via Wikipedia

This is a completely different form of organization from that which controls most newspapers today. Instead of a few companies with a large number of employees it is a network of skilled individual entrepreneurs. In many ways it's a return to the way newspapers used to be locally owned and run.

The solution is to hire somebody to sell advertising. That person does not have to come from the neighborhood. All that's required is for Jack to supply a list of the right contacts and phone numbers. And, hey, we've got the beginnings of a ki work virtual business selling ads for a number of these news microsites. Advertisers can then be offered packages covering several areas. But the whole thing's flexible unlike a newspaper with its fixed staff and other costs.

There are other ways for Jack to develop his virtual business across the internet. Resources can be shared. He could strike a deal with a movie site to provide reviews for the shows at the local multiplex. Both sides will gain traffic. In ki work terms it represents a form of collaborative capitalism where small businesses are able to undercut large corporations. Big may be beautiful, but in the online world it's not always financially viable.

Related articles by Zemanta

• A Few Ways To Fix Newspapers

How collaborative capitalism could reinvent newspapers

I'm convinced that ki work's platform for collaborative capitalism is part of the future. Why? Partly bImage via Wikipediaecause I can see how it could be at the heart of successors to the newspaper industry which has provided me with a living for most of my life.

Believe me,  newspapers today are not a good business to be in, as I'm sure you'd be told by Sam Zell owner of Tribune Co which includes the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and other dailies. His company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday at the same time as the New York Times was attempting to renegotiate its debts with its bankers.

The credit crunch might seal the fate of these once great institutions, but they were dying anyway. It's a sad time for me. This is the family business which is receiving the last rites. Both my parents were newspàper journalists. Printing ink runs through my veins.

Wishing for a swift demise

Now part of me wishes papers would just hurry up and disappear. Newspapers may be dying but the global appetite for news is alive and well. What remains will be a perfect candidate for virtual organization, for collaborative capitalism, for the ki work model.

To explain this I'm afraid I'll have to look a little at newspaper economics. Don't worry this isn't too complex, but I need to show how this isn't a business which is going to re-emerge from the other side of the recession.

As I've said, demand for news is not in decline. The audience is generally increasing. It's just that in developed countries the growth is online or for rolling TV news channels. Newspaper circulations are falling, but not at a speed that explains the catastrophic state of the industry's finances.

The central problem is lost advertising revenue. And you don't have to look far to see what's gone wrong. In the US it's craigslist that's most clearly wielded the newspaper-killer's knife. It's stolen the biggest newspaper income stream - classified advertising. It might sound as if I'm accusing craigslist-founder Craig Newmark of robbery and murder, but it is really closer to euthanasia.

Where have all the ads gone?

Before the likes of craigslist came along anybody wanting to fill a job vacancy, sell real Image via Wikipediaestate or rent an apartment would almost certainly have turned to their local newspaper. Individually, the classified ads they paid for might not have cost much, but together they represented a very profitable business.

Unfortunately any industry that's too reliant on one source of income is vulnerable. A large proportion of classified advertising has moved online and it won't return to newspapers if and when the recession ends. But ironically the readership for many newspaper titles is larger than it has ever been. It's just the audience is visiting websites rather than buying papers from newsstands.  And nobody has yet figured a way of sufficiently monetizing news websites. In reality they're all losing money.

The only way a newspaper can claim to have a profitable website is through an accounting trick. The cost of news-gathering, administration and real estate has to be stripped out. Newspaper websites are really no different from the leech-like news-related blogs which simply comment on stories that have been tracked down, researched, written or broadcast by 'traditional' media. Running a newspaper is very expensive.

It all sounds hopeless, but I remain optimistic that although newspapers are dying, something different and better can take their place. The future is virtual. Strip out most of the costs of real estate, printing presses, management, computer networks and administrative infrastructure, then you've got the potential for a sustainable news organization.

In my next blog posting I'll outline how I think a virtual news organization would function.

UPDATE: Robert Peston, the BBC's economics editor, has an interesting take on how a different form of capitalism might look. Read his view on New Capitalism here.

What can Ants teach us about Business?

When it comes to organization you might have thought ants were pretty close to perfection. Every member of a colony knows its knows its place and exactly what its role in life is. It's a system that's worked for probably millions of years, but recently one species has found there is room for improvement. And it's having a devastating effect on every other life form that comes into contact with it.

There is a frighteningly detailed report in Science Daily describing the 'new pest'. Well to us it might be a destructive and disruptive pest, but to this fairly unknown group of ants this is success. If they were people they'd be dominating their market.

The 'lasius neglectus' species got its name because it was ignored by science. Not any more. It's now creating 'super-colonies' which are destroying everything in their path as they cut a swathe across Europe. The secret of their success is the presence of multiple queens in a single colony. Other ant organizations fall apart when their single queen is taken out.

Could a similarly loose form of organization have a similar effect on the world of work? As global businesses with fixed goals and structures crumble under the impact of the credit crunch it's a vital question.

At ki work we believe there is an alternative in the form of 'collaborative capitalism'. The development of loose, flexible business organizations able to adapt without cost almost instantly to change poses as much of a threat to 'traditional' companies as the 'lasius neglectus' has had on the ecosystems it's come into contact with.

Until recently the ants didn't pose too much of a threat as they don't fly. But they've also found a new way to travel, hitching rides in flower pots transported across borders. Is this the insect internet?

Have ants found the answer to business growth?