Information Age: Individual Job Outsourcing

Outsourcing has been largely thought as mainly company based commercial operations. However in the real world, given today’s deepening of the digital economy or information age, the application of outsourcing has been broadening to include individual operations.

The oxymoronic account  of where a company caught an employee  outsourcing one’s job, from CNN.com, which led to his termination, seems like a manifestation of such snowballing dynamic

After a U.S.-based "critical infrastructure" company discovered in 2012 its computer systems were being accessed from China, its security personnel caught the culprit ultimately responsible: Not a hacker from the Middle Kingdom but one of the company's own employees sitting right at his desk in the United States.

The software developer is simply referred to as "Bob," according to a case study by the U.S. telecommunications firm Verizon Business.

Bob was an "inoffensive and quiet" programmer in his mid-40's, according to his employee profile, with "a relatively long tenure with the company" and "someone you wouldn't look at twice in an elevator."

Those innocuous traits led investigators to initially believe the computer access from China using Bob's credentials was unauthorized -- and that some form of malware was sidestepping strong two-factor authentication that included a token RSA key fob under Bob's name.

Investigators then discovered Bob had "physically FedExed his RSA token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday," wrote Andrew Valentine, a senior forensic investigator for Verizon.

Bob had hired a programming firm in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang to do his work. His helpers half a world away worked overnight on a schedule imitating an average 9-to-5 workday in the United States. He paid them one-fifth of his six-figure salary, according to Verizon.

Some thoughts

Programmer Bob’s offense has really not been about outsourcing but of the unauthorized disclosure of what has been internal corporate affairs to a third party.

In the digital economy or the information age, non-contiguous work requirements enable outsourcing on an international scale. The non-sensitivity to geographic confines means that work can be delegated to a specialty agent wherever access to connectivity is present. This translates to job  decentralization or semi-autonomous jobs or jobs that allows for “home based” work or telecommutation.  I may add that semi-autonomous work may not really be “home based” or static work location but about mobility.

Deepening decentralization of industries and jobs will translate to decentralization of living areas. Thus, the incompatibility of mainstream concept of industrial age “urbanization” with decentralization.

Outsourcing, which contributes to the informal economy, should continue to grow as the world’s economy gravitates towards technology inspired specialization.