While I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, WebTrends gave me a copy of Call To Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results at a seminar in April. Little did I know until just now, but apparently a lot of other people either got the book or are buying the book. According to this article by ClickZ News, in the three weeks since it was released, Call To Action has made its way onto the New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and Amazon.com bestseller lists.

What makes this so amazing is that the authors used no traditional advertising for their initial launch, only a good strategy to build online buzz. Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing has become increasingly sophisticated over the last few years with the advent of blogs as mass media and other online message boards. Right now, we’re putting together a few online WOM campaigns for our clients. Let me know if you’d like to talk about one for your company. In the meantime, I’m going to get started on this book…

Small businesses struggle every day to keep up with large corporate competitors, especially in terms of hiring good talent. KPMG has launched a new program that may be relatively easy for smaller firms to add to their employee package - paid leave for volunteer activities. While this shouldn’t take the place of company-wide volunteer programs, encouraging employees to get involved in the community is a terrific way to boost employee morale, as well as appeal to top job prospects. While you may not be able to keep pace in terms of cash compensation, creatively thinking about your overall benefits package can be a deal closer for altruistic professionals.

A blog for Colorado politicos has a post and discussion today surrounding a story that appears in the Denver Post and local NBC affiliate KUSA regarding the offshore outsourcing of a state project that proposes, ironically, to help disabled workers in Colorado find jobs. While I’ve touched on the impact outsourcing has on employees, I haven’t delved much into the political impact of the trade practice.

In one form or another, outsourcing overseas has hit manufacturing workers for decades. However, manufacturing workers are largely unionized and consequentially a fairly predictable group of voters. White collar professionals represent a large number of unaffiliated voters, so putting a stop to offshoring bubbled up to the presidential campaign level and became a talking point for Sen. John Kerry last year as part of a strategy to reach these voters.

The President’s response was strategic, linking the issue to the economy and his education and workforce training initiatives by saying that America needs more skilled workers so we can perform these jobs ourselves. Very true. America also needs companies willing to “homeshore” contracts by building domestic operations, much like Rural Sourcing in Arkansas is doing. It’s not rocket science, but it does take a strategic commitment to foster a domestic homeshoring industry.

Politically, it seems like neither party has a clear vision for the role of offshoring in our economy that has taken shape in the form of policy. Worker training is key, as are jobs for those workers. Tax cuts for companies that retain employees in the United States would be great, as would standards for government contracts that factor in whether the work will be performed domestically or offshore. If you know of states or agencies that work like this, please let me know.

Will this be an ongoing political issue? Oh yes. Professional service employees will continue to be a gigantic block of swing voters, and even as the economy becomes more robust, offshoring is a parallel trend that will create a job squeeze for both professional firms and workers. While the extent to which politicians and government apparatus can affect the trend is limited, the rhetoric most likely will not be.

Companies who have engaged in offshoring love that they can now keep programmers crunching out code around the clock, but the consequences are starting to wear through, as reported in this article from the Houston Chronicle. Can you imagine how hard it would be to basically shift an entire project over to a whole new team every 12 hours? According to this article, domestic IT staff have felt the impact in the form of “midnight teleconferences, 6 a.m. video meetings and the annoying ‘pling’ of instant messages and twittering cell phones all night long.” Stuff like this leaves even a 50-hour work week in the dust, resulting in hard and fast burnout for employees.

Of course, if this cycle continues, as domestic employees get burned out faster, then the labor pool shrinks, and companies feel compelled to push even more jobs overseas.

It’s intersting that of all the activities offshore outsourcers are eager to take on, News.com reports that one they won’t touch is payroll services, supposedly due to industry giant ADP.

While ADP does offer a host of valuable services, we have actually found Paychex to be more responsive and an all around better fit for small and medium businesses. If you are looking at a way to resolve your HR issues, let me know and we can talk about setting up a solution for you.

As anticipated, Microsoft this week launched the latest version of its Pocket PC operating system, Windows Mobile 5.0. Reaction has varied from its impact on the cell phone market to the portable multimedia market.

For small business owners, the new OS means more options for software and hardware to meet specific industry needs, specifically for sales professionals and field technicians. There are also expanded mobile e-mail solutions, including a push e-mail functionality with Exchange that should give RIM a run for their money. According to PC World, users will be able to use a landscape display, making it easier to view Web pages. Also Nextel users will enjoy a new “push-to-talk” compatibility. Apparently Microsoft is aggressively encouraging developers to create 5.0 applications through a $25,000 contest.

As a longtime user of T-Mobile’s Pocket PC (no longer available), I like being able to edit Word and Excel documents from my handheld, only once I loaded the file back to my desktop, the formatting was gone, including any graphics. Windows Mobile 5.0 will correct that issue. While everything soulds great, we’ll have to see how the system works in the field before offering a recommendation.

The Washington Post this morning writes on efforts by Pakistanis in the United States to build the offshoring industry in their country, but rightly so the author keeps a skeptical outlook. While Pakistanis in the U.S. hope to bring home some of the $12.8 billion that India generated in outsourcing last year, U.S. companies mentioned sizable security and infrastructure risks. One Rockville, MD-based company visited Pakistan recently to tour call-center facilities “escorted by armed guards” and acknowledged that “‘The power grid’s not stable, so once a month, workers might lose a day and a half.’”

According to this article, the purchase decision for U.S. companies comes down to price - $6 per hour to have a programmer test out new code. Yet this model does not seem sustainable. Pakistan clearly needs infrastructure development, but that will be expensive. So if they install this expensive infrastructure, the costs will be passed on to clients, who will then be paying more, and the chief benefit of offshoring is dimisnished. The instability of these growing operations is likely to hurt, not help, American companies over the long run.

Nicholas Carr (formerly editor of the Harvard Business Review) seems to be on board the outsourcing train, albeit from a unique perspective. His view is that IT will become a centralized function provided by utilities, much like cable or electricity. However I find it hard to imagine companies looking at computers and technology investment merely as a cost of doing business like they would the electric bill. Electricity is either on or off - there are no grades of value to the end user. Good, up-to-date technology on the other hand has a far more variable impact on company performance and employee productivity. That is the essential difference from IT and utilities - IT provides both hardware and the network. Utilities typically only provide the network.

Utilities are the means not the end. Electricity does not require hardware, whereas hardware (computers) require electricity. Even as software becomes networked, hardware investment will continue to be a huge investment for companies and they will need people to make those purchase decisions. Here at Flat Creek, obviously we would like to see that function outsourced, but it’s hard to imagine it becoming centralized even as the global economy becomes more competitive. A more relevant analogy than electric utilities might be the phone industry, where utilities provide access to the lines while independent service providers install the phones, PBX systems, etc to access the lines. While the term “computer” is becoming more ubiquitous every day, it’s a far cry from becoming a utility.

Provocateur predicts ‘end of corporate computing’ CNET News.com

This article from News.com is pretty dated, but telling about the impact of offshoring on US workers. According to this study, “93 percent of IT workers are concerned about the impact of offshore outsourcing on their industry.“

eWeek is reporting that Microsoft “is poised to launch this month the next version of its mobile operating system, Windows Mobile 2005, which will incorporate push e-mail capabilities with Microsoft Exchange Server.” This will dramatically alter the purchase decision for companies looking to deploy wirelesses devices.

RIM has always been the favorite because it can push e-mails to the device as soon as they hit the server whereas Pocket PCs and Treos must be set to check for new messages at a certain time interval. Since Pocket PC has far superior supporting software (calendar, contacts, tasks, Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, etc) to RIM, then the ability to push e-mail will make them much more attractive devices.

Now, if someone could just put together a decent keyboard… RIM still has the edge on that feature.