Smells like Singularity

You're going to have to bear with me on this one as the geek is strong in this post.

Charles Stross' science fiction novel Accelerando is a set of 9 related stories taking place around the singularity . From the wikipedia article: The first three stories follow the character of "venture altruist" Manfred Macx starting in the early 21st Century. Although I read Accelerando a while back, the Macx character stuck with me. He augments his intelligence with a host of autonomic processes (presumably running on servers in the cloud) that are at his command. Instead of storing information he has to remember in his meat brain, he tells the processes to go "remember" a certain thing by storing the information in the cloud and uses the same processes to remind him of whatever he needs to know right at that moment. As a result, he's one of the most intelligent, capable people on the planet, until he gets mugged and loses the cybernetic goggles that he uses to interact with his virtual assistants. Withouth the goggles, he's effectively lobotomized and can barely function.

Does any of this sound familiar? Ok how about now?

Another idea from the book that stuck with me is that of reputation markets and a reputation-based economy. While our economy is very much based on goods and services, it seems like a company or person's reputation/brand is more important than ever. Fueled by social media and other forms of real time, mass communication, we are more affected by our reputation and more sensitive to it. Why else are many folks monitoring twitter for mentions of their brand? I talked to the Chief Marketing Officer of a local software company today and she explained that one of their employee's near full-time job was monitoring social media sites for mention of their company and then convening a response team to review each mention and decide whether/how to respond. The explosion of blogging is also related to this sensitivity to reputation. We blog in part to enhance our reputations.

Ok, so what do virtual assistants and the power of reputation mean for the future of Software Support? I have some thouthts here:

1. People are going to become a lot more efficient at finding answers to their own issues if the answers are somewhere online. Its already possible to solve any number of technical problems with a google search. Now imagine that you don't even have to open your browser, or better yet even go to the computer. You're working on your car and you need some help figuring out how to replace the water pump. You just tell your virtual assistant what you're looking for and it scours the internet and finds an instructional video of the procedure and puts it on your tv so you can see. This strikes me as a good development. I like finding the answer to a new customer problem in the knowledgebase but I like it even more if they find it themselves and never call as a result.
2. Knowledgebase Content is more important than ever. The value that Suport Engineers will bring is through creating customer-consumable knowledge. This idea is explained better in Jay Grady's blog.
3. The quality of the knowledge that a virtual assistant can go out and get is going to be questionable without some measure of the relative quality of the source. That measure is going to be reputation. If you're trying to find the list of the first 100 prime numbers, you're going to trust the famous mathematician over the freshman math major because the famous mathematician is going to have a better reputation for knowing about numbers. I predict we'll see a quantitative measure of reputation for entities (corporate and individual) and that reputation points will determine how those entities are heard (like in a search ranking). Virtual assistants will use the reputation of answering entities to rank their results and hopefully return the best answer to a question.
   

Opening salvo - check out odesk

I had a lot of ideas for my initial post here, but I haven't made time to write them up yet. Hence, I'm going to expand on something that came up at work, recently.

Odesk is blowing my mind a little bit. To me, the big idea is that it provides a framework for a small business to access the potential savings involved in outsourcing work overseas. My experience (from a distance) with outsourcing is that quite a bit of investment is necessary before any coding is delivered.

• Committing to a staffing model for your overseas team is non-trivial. My company was looking at either going through a contractor (2/3 of what you pay goes to the contractor, so you get cheaper folks) while the other option of incorporating locally is probably majorly expensive too.
  
• Once you know the team, there's still quite a bit of preparation and almost always some travel to the country in question if not shipping someone overseas to stay for a couple of years.
  

I've always seen outsourcing as this heavy-duty process, frought with opportunities to make costly mistakes. However, odesk seems to bring the potential to get work done by an overseas team without some of that hassle. In fact, with an average project cost of $5000, odesk seems optimized for the little guy.

I can see the potential for a lot of different jobs that a smaller company might want done and odesk has the providers to do them. The really crazy thing (to me anyway) is how no job seems too small. For instance, people are looking to hire a virtual assistant to build their online brand (basically work their facebook and linkedin accounts). I saw one job advertized from a person who wanted somebody to do job research (find all sales jobs in my area, then fill out a spreadsheet with the job and (with the help of linkedin, facebook, whatever) the contact info of the hiring manager, the VP of Sales, and the VP of HR. The whole virtual assistant idea to me is fascinating. Clearly, there's a market there and people willing to meet the needs of that market.

While I'm not convinced (yet, anyway) that outsourcing enterprise software support to an overseas team, especially for the complex product I currently support, will ever be as effective as having an experienced domestic team, I can see some potential in odesk for some of what we do. Some tasks aren't in the core competency of a Customer Support Engineer, but are critical to success all the same.

One thing that springs to mind is KB content creation. For any Enterprise Software Support organization, you'll have a big bunch of closed cases that can be mined for possible knowledgebase articles. It's not particularly challenging work, but it usually doesn't get done because the CSEs are too interrupt-driven to spend time writing out content. As a result, CSEs spend time typing up the same set of instructions or working tickets that could have been resolved by self-service. How cool would it be to be able to hire someone for $10/hour to rifle through the support history (you could give them a CSE login) and knock out a whole bunch of KB articles? Our customer portal software has a little bit of workflow with it too, so we could have the provider submit a bunch of drafts to be reviewed by a CSE prior to being published. Its potentially a cheaper way towards a prolific knowledge base. Since rating content is something that customers can do in our support portal software, one could even incent the content creators with extra bucks for positively reviewed (by the customer) articles.

An industry rule of thumb for most software is that you can address up to 40% of the issues that customers are going to see with effective KB content. My company's main product isn't even as great a fit for knowledgebase articles as say, a cloud service, in that many issues might be too specific to be apply to another customer. However, we're starting to see a lot of growth in self service or at least usage of self service content since building out the knowledge base. That translates to savings. Makes me wonder what additional savings me might attain with a team of knowledgebase authors constantly adding fresh content.

Do you have experience using odesk or with outsourcing in the support world you'd like to share? Feel free to have your virtual assistant log in and comment on your behalf.