| ||
| ||
“Virtual Practices?”– what the heck, you may ask. Well, we hope, it’s not an oxymoron.
We took the “practice” definition from legal and accounting firms. These firms, some of them are very famous and wealthy now, had been built from several core competencies and then grew by adding extra expertise in a form of “practices”. Why it should be “virtual”? As Eugene Volokh, UCLA professor of law and pioneer in virtual practices in law said, “It doesn’t matter what the medium is. What matters is the content”. We envision a virtual corporation consisting of a number of independent virtual practices linked by ITDynamo to share skills, costs and access to one another’s market.
That’s the way how we have built our portal, our Career Matters, and JobExposer, the first Canadian job search engine built on the RSS technology. The Personal Web Marketing and Job Hunter Ammo Virtual Practices will follow. We would like to hear from individuals who believe that they may contribute and participate in fun and sharing rewards. However, everybody who is willing to build their own company from scratch and share ideas and costs is also welcome. Owners of existing ventures, who see benefits of such networking, join us! We are looking for outstanding partners!
What makes us believe that the right people will come? The answer is quite simple - the success of self-organizing collaborative communities starting from Linux and Apache to Firefox and RSS to blogging movement and Wikipedia. These communities, which have roots in the academic and scientific environment, have come together through private networks and later the Internet, to pool their brainpower. What keeps us amazed is their vision and technological superiority over corporations with billions of dollars in R & D, established customer base and hundreds MBAs in business and marketing departments. They came to attention when IBM, Oracle, Sun, Novell and other biggies admitted the superiority of the open source products and came to these loosely organized and informal structures with requests in assistance and collaboration.
What drives people into participating in the open source development? According to a book with the catchy name “The World is Flat. A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century” written by a visionary, Thomas L. Friedman, the open-source is nothing more than peer-reviewed science. Sometimes people contribute to these because they make science, they discover things, and the reward is reputation. Sometimes you can build a business out of it and/or sometimes they just want to increase the store of knowledge in the world. Another reason, mentioned in the book, is that sometimes people have no choice but to develop a product because the available market offerings do not satisfy their needs.
No matter what drives those people, the results of their collaboration are astonishing. Maybe, the loosely organized horizontal peer communities of programmers, bloggers and encyclopedists with bottom up approaches in development of their products, had better met the Information Age requirements. Anyway, they seem to be better suited for this purpose than the big corporations that feature the vertically oriented hierarchies and top-down approach tailored rather for the Industrial Age. As The Economist mused in 2004, “some zealots even argue that the open-source approach represents a new, post-capitalist model of production”.
Is it true? We do not know. We just noticed through our own experiences as well experiences of people we know that the IT pros are grossly underserved, that they more often than not are unprepared to the Information Age challenges, and that information-wise the IT labour market is not in good shape, to say the least.
Having not found the answers in the existing business and/or technology infrastructures and service offerings, we decided to create our own solutions. We are doing it on a shoestring budget, after hours and sometimes in ungodly hours. We are using whatever collaboration tools we can find and afford Skype, a hosted Intranet solution, 1-888 teleconferencing, e-mail, landlines and a monthly traditional beer party with chicken wings. We are excited, we are psyched! It’s a beauty when out of nowhere, from a casual chat in a backyard or an idea that sparked after reading another blog or book, new products are born and implemented. Will they be successful? Will our business model be viable? You be the judges.
Meanwhile, we have no inclination to stop, we just started. We are working in the following directions:
As you can see, we are not short of ideas, however, we are short of people and we are looking for people who share our vision and able and willing to contribute. We are a for-profit company, but we would like to improve the IT job landscape and would like to share direct and indirect rewards with our brothers-in-arms, the IT professionals. If you would like to participate in our Virtual Practices, contact us at: vp@itdynamo.com. Enjoy Business!
printer friendly