Bruce –
I have some opinions on such a comparison, just not sure if I want to share it yet.
Anyway... our little gem made the Calgary Herald Business Section.
COMPANY TAPS ONLINE WORKFORCE
Net Shepherd rallies Web employees
Matthew McClearn, Calgary Herald
The boardroom, water cooler and other gathering places of the white-collar workplace face a new challenger as a site for corporate discourse.
Net Shepherd Inc. is developing a virtual workforce that collaborates using Internet applications. The Calgary company believes it has a model for the office of the future.
Like the agora in ancient Greece and countless places since, the Internet has become a popular venue for social interaction.
Virtual communities -- groups of people who share interests online, like bird watchers or poetry clubs that meet in cyberspace instead of kitchens and smoky bars -- are nearly as old as the Internet itself.
But whereas virtual communities have traditionally formed around recreational and entertainment interests, Net Shepherd means business.
"It's a fascinating voyage of discovery," says Peter Hunt, Net Shepherd's newly hired vice-president of corporate affairs.
"The Internet changes the economics of communication. It therefore changes the economics of the possible. What we're doing is, in a commercial business-to-business space, finding new possibilities that simply weren't there before."
In 1996, Ron Warris founded the company to evaluate World Wide Web content for suitability to various age groups.
Its first project was to assess 1.5-million sites and catalogue them in a database. Rather than do the work itself, it assembled 300 people, the Internet Explorers Society, and developed software to help them work together. Members chose their own workloads and were compensated accordingly.
Despite the Internet's impersonal nature, online relationships developed. Workers even arranged a wrap-up party, attended by 175 people who had never met face to face.
"A real sense of community evolved," Warris says. "That's when I started thinking about creating an environment where people can form communities and work together on these sorts of projects."
The result was the Internet Community Technology Platform. The company licenses that technology to companies it sets up (with hopes of profiting from future initial public offerings of shares) and may license it to others. It's also the platform that facilitates the Internet Explorers Society.
"What we really have is an asset of people, people that we can have do all kinds of different things," Warris says. "We're changing the way work can be done by leveraging the Internet and community advantage."
So far, Net Shepherd has only applied its community to information-gathering tasks.
For example, Dun & Bradstreet Corp. hired Net Shepherd last year to collect corporate data from 10,000 business Web sites. It's a task the New Jersey-based market information firm usually does by phone, a method that's becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.
Fifty members of the Net Explorers Society completed the job in three days, and an audit rated the accuracy of their work at 90 per cent.
But Warris asserts that when it reaches a critical population with diverse expertise, it will be capable of far more than menial tasks.
He wants to expand the Internet Explorers Society to 10,000 members by the end of the summer from its current 1,500, and apply them to nearly any job imaginable.
"If they can get this community wrapped around some sort of focused cause, they should be able to have a very successful business model," says Brian Pow, technology analyst at Acumen Capital.
"The risk is that Net Shepherd invents a market and does all the pioneering work, only to have someone else come in behind them and duplicate it," says Pow.
Whether or not Net Shepherd has the right model for online business interaction, futurists agree that the Internet will be a significant collaboration tool in the next century.
"It's very different than working in an office-type environment," says Canadian Internet guru Rick Broadhead. "I think perhaps they (Net Shepherd) are on the verge of a whole new trend in the human resources field, a whole new way for companies to define workers and get them very quickly."
In light of the downsizing and outsourcing common in today's labour market, a virtual workforce has considerable appeal.
"More people are working out of their homes, businesses are building branch offices," says Broadhead. "The Internet is the cheapest way to facilitate large groups of people . . . online collaboration is very efficient."
Properly engineered, a virtual office can produce results rapidly.
"A company that comes along and says: 'We can serve your needs immediately;' that's very attractive for organizations to whom time is everything," Broadhead adds.
But Net Shepherd must also contend with the daunting task of marketing a largely intangible service to customers who aren't accustomed to this new method of business.
Equally daunting is managing the quality of the output of legions of online employees. And it must provide the community with ample reason, and sufficient work, to keep them coming back.
"The quality of the experience we provide for people has an impact on how long they stay, how motivated they are, and how much you have to pay them," says Net Shepherd president Don Sandford.
And if virtual communities are the workplace of the future, this will have far-reaching implications for tomorrow's workers, not the least of which is a completely new -- some would say isolating -- way of interacting with fellow employees.
For Net Shepherd, its decision to abandon it's original rating business (which Warris confesses was a small market) to pursue the business possibilities of virtual communities has made its corporate nameplate largely irrelevant.
"The name (Net Shepherd) doesn't even represent what we do any more," Warris says, adding the company may rename itself. "There's no question we've changed, but that's the nature of the Internet and business today."
Net Shepherd's online community, intermittently under construction, can be found at www.netexplorers.com.
calgaryherald.com
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Denise. |
