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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]

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Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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