<<OT>> A Look At Micro-e-commerce... Office Web Moonlighting...
Pulled this from www.forbes.com...
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April 27, 1998
Confessions of an Online Moonlighter
With E-mail and fast Web connections at their
fingertips, many office workers are tempted to do a
little business of their own on company time.
David Whitford
y name is Dave, and I'm a digital moonlighter. I'm on the
wagon, but that could be because I have no choice; the
job I have now eats up every waking moment and invades
my dreams. At my old job, where the pace was less thrilling, I lived a
double life. It could happen again.
Always, I really do believe, I did right by my employer, to whom I
was grateful for giving me so much: health insurance, a nifty private
office, free coffee, and work that was stimulating, creative, and fun. I
felt appreciated. I'd be there still if something even better hadn't come
along. I had just one complaint. The pay was skimpy. I needed more.
So I did what restless people have always done in such situations: I
picked up some side work. Never mind the details. All you need to
know about the service I performed for my corporate clients is that it
paid well, it didn't take a whole lot out of me, it didn't harm my
employer, and the IRS was kept fully informed. I could do this work
wherever and whenever I wanted. All I needed was a phone line and
a computer. Everything else I carried between my ears.
At first I confined my sideline activities to evenings and weekends.
But as business improved, the line I had drawn between my work as
an employee and my work as sole proprietor of a growing business
became blurry. My regular job required that I spend hours every day
in a modern office outfitted with all the latest communications
technology. If I had a little time on my hands, or even if I just needed
a break, why not be productive in some other way?
Before I knew it, I had become a digital moonlighter--leveraging my
employer's full complement of high-tech productivity tools to run my
own business; not always after hours but concurrently with my
regular job, operating in the seams of a normal workday. I used
E-mail to manage communications with my clients. I turned to the
Web whenever I needed to look something up. I faxed documents
straight from my computer. With practice, I grew adept at switching
from salaryman to entrepreneur and back again--instantly, invisibly,
and without budging from my chair--simply by closing one file and
opening another. It was a nonstop juggling act--exhausting, sure, but
also intoxicating. By the end, I was making so much money on the
side that my paycheck looked puny by comparison.
How common is digital moonlighting? It's very difficult to tell. Ask the
question of a roomful of office workers and you'll get plenty of
snickers but few confessions. Michael Whitman, a business school
professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is one of the few
willing to go on record. In addition to his teaching duties, Whitman
reviews books, develops Powerpoint slide shows, and sells
Himalayan kittens, all with big help from office E-mail and the Web.
"I couldn't do a fourth of what I'm doing now without it," Whitman
admits.
As for the extent of digital moonlighting in corporate settings, hard
evidence is lacking. In a survey last fall of human resources types
conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management
(SHRM), 80% said they were confident that bringing E-mail to the
workplace had increased employee productivity. Their attitudes
toward the Web were somewhat less sanguine; 48% said it was a
plus for productivity, 39% called the effect neutral, and only 6% saw
it as a distraction.
But what the SHRM survey underscores is just how far information
technology has invaded the traditional workplace. An overwhelming
majority of companies (86%) have E-mail these days, and most of
those (74%) have systems that let employees communicate directly
with the outside world. About as many companies (79%) said they
granted Internet access to some, if not all, of their employees.
Together, those findings describe what amounts to an invisible breach
in the castle wall through which all manner of digital activity can flow.
"That's one of the fascinating aspects of this information revolution,"
says Jeffrey Rayport, an associate professor at Harvard Business
School. "It's all happening in the ether. As you walk through cubicle
land and you look at a bunch of people staring at computer screens,
you don't really know what they're doing and whether it in fact
represents value-adding work. It may well be value-adding--just not
to the guy who's paying for the T1 connection and the PC on the
desktop."
Whole new forms of moonlighting are possible today. Virtual
retailing, for example. Already both Amazon.com and
BarnesandNoble.com invite enterprising digital moonlighters to earn
commissions on referrals from their personal home pages. If it works
for books, why not CDs, clothing, or cars? What this means is that
it's getting easier all the time to become an effortless digital retailer.
All you need is a home page (which you might just get, free, from
your employer). You'll never have to touch the goods. You'll never
have to manage order flow. You'll never even have to take payment.
Just a couple of HTML links, and, presto, you're in business.
More intriguing still is the opening represented by companies like the
Round Table Group (RTG), a four-year-old consulting firm based in
Chicago. RTG uses the Web and E-mail to maintain a virtual
network of academic experts, configurable on demand. A client
comes to RTG with a project in mind, the electronic call goes out
over RTG's network, and an appropriate match is made.
Recently, when RTG did a blanket E-mailing of Harvard Business
School faculty members seeking digital moonlighters, the
administration responded testily, discouraging (though not prohibiting)
professors from signing up. Of course, professors at top-shelf
business schools have always moonlighted for corporate clients. But
the way Harvard saw it, RTG's solicitation was something more
ominous, akin to a digital raid on intellectual assets. Which, according
to Rayport, raises an important question for all employers in an age
when office walls are increasingly porous, namely, "Who really owns
the intellectual assets that sit inside the heads of people on the
payroll?"
Some experts believe that reports of digital moonlighting may be
early signs of an epochal transformation in the workplace --away
from the prevailing norm of one job with one employer toward a
more flexible arrangement involving multiple employers. "I clearly
anticipate the number of people with multiple, simultaneous careers to
multiply because of the Internet," says Jack Nilles, president of JALA
International, a management consultancy. Some employers might
even encourage it: as a perk in a tight labor market, or better yet,
with the goal of channeling digital moonlighting in ways that benefit
both the individual and the organization. Employees, for their part,
might seek out employers willing to bargain for, say, first dibs on
60% of their time, accepting less pay in return for permission to
moonlight from the office.
"We have an assumption that an employment relationship is
exclusive," says Thomas Malone, co-director of the MIT initiative on
Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century. "It seems to me we
may look back on that a few years from now as another one of the
Industrial Age assumptions that's no longer a dominant view of how
work can be organized."
Why did factories become the preferred method of organizing work
in the early 1800s? Mainly, some historians argue, to stem chronic
moonlighting. It seems that long before Henry Ford's production line
and Frederick Taylor's scientific management, just getting people out
of the house, away from everything else they could be doing, was
enough to produce meaningful productivity gains.
Positive incentives, in other words, are not the only way to motivate
workers, or even, sometimes, the most effective. "Just excluding
activities is actually an incentive instrument in its own right," says MIT
economics professor Bengt Holmstrom. "You don't have to do
anything else!"
Now into every modern workplace comes the Internet. A powerful
productivity tool, to be sure, but not like the 19th-century kind. For
the Internet expands our choice of on-the-job activities and excludes
nothing. Speaking strictly for myself, I find the temptation sometimes
irresistible. |
