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Filed under: Business, Features, Analysis

Three reasons IT departments are shrinking


Reading Network World's article about Nicholas Carr's new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google got us thinking about the future demise of corporate IT departments. So, in everyone's favorite format, here are our 3 reasons why traditional IT departments are shrinking:

Outsourcing - Whether it's customer service or application hosting, outsourcing is becoming more and more prevalant in the corporate IT world. Avoiding the financial overhead associated with running certain IT functions internally is often impetus for choosing to outsource. For instance, companies are presented with a choice between running e-mail in-house (pay IT staff salary and benefits, purchase servers and software, and find quality rack space) or outsourcing it to, for example, Google Apps which is free (though ad-supported) and includes popular groupware features like calendars, web pages, document sharing, etc. Similarly, sites like Salesforce.com can offer full customer-relationship management (CRM) software online for a fraction of the respective overhead required to run CRM in a company IT department.

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Productivity, Web services

Outsource your dirty work with Do My Stuff

Today after work you have to pick up your dry cleaning, get an oil change, pick up the kids from soccer practice, buy groceries, make reservations for dinner, and find a birthday card for your mother in law. Short on time? Why not hire someone else to do it?

DoMyStuff is a new website designed to find other people to do your dirty work for you. On the site you can list "anything" you need to have done and then allow others to bid on your task. When you post your listing you can decide how long people have to bid as well as limit those allowed to bid by their location or user rating. Once bidding ends users can select an assistant from applicants. Payments are placed in an escrow account to make sure everyone stays honest, and there is a message board where clients can communicate with the people they hire while they're completing longer tasks.

The site is very similar to RentaCoder which specializes in outsourcing software and website assistance, except for people who need help with day to day tasks rather than code.


[Via ArsTechnica]

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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