When a virus paralysed Amy Patton's office computer system, Patton, the owner of Phoenix Construction, a small commercial construction company, panicked. "I was sitting there watching all my clients' records disappearing," she recalled. "It was very frightening."
Her fears were soon quelled, however, by a simple phone call to a free-lance help desk expert she learned about from All.com, a Texas-based online clearinghouse that links independent IT professionals with small and medium-size companies. The expert, coaching Patton over the phone, helped her neutralise the virus "almost instantly," limiting the amount of lost client data, she said.
Phoenix takes advantage of the services of independent contractors because the 40-person company can't afford its own IT staff, according to Patton. However, large enterprises are also beginning to enlist the help of technology free-lancers to bolster overburdened IT departments. Giga Information Group estimates that free-lancers now make up 30 percent of the global IT work force. That percentage is likely to rise, analysts say, as corporations continue to struggle to complete e-business projects on tight deadlines while faced with a shallow pool of high-tech talent.
"Contractors are a vital component in nearly every IT shop," said Kazim Isfahani, an analyst at Giga, in Stamford, Conn. "Many tasks simply would not get done if people couldn't hire contractors to do them."
But before turning to outside contractors, Isfahani urges IT leaders to have a strategy for managing the interaction between temporary and full-time employees. First and foremost, communication is critical to avoid misunderstandings between the two groups, he said.
"Certain political issues can crop up," particularly if one team is under the impression that it is responsible for a project, or an aspect of a project, that has in fact been assigned to the other team, he said.
It's crucial for IT managers to establish an open forum for discussion of any such questions to avoid confusion or resentment, he added. And to facilitate communication, managers may consider deploying Web-based collaborative software or adding contractors to IT e-mail groups.
While the thought of managing teams of independent contractors may seem daunting, it is not dissimilar to managing any type of remote staff, some observers say. To that end, managers need to "set clear goals and follow up" with independent workers to ensure that projects are progressing on schedule, said Keith Widyolar, director of corporate communications at Opus360, the New York-based producer of FreeAgent.com, a service that allows Web developers and other high-tech professionals to promote themselves online.
Finding free-lance talent
Besides FreeAgent.com and All.com, a number of new services have cropped up in recent months to help companies find outside IT help. HotDispatch, an online marketplace for the buying and selling of high-tech expertise, enables corporate users to post their IT problems online and then review pitches from high-tech professionals offering to solve them, said the company's CEO, Mike Kaul.
"The premise is beyond just quick-and-dirty skills matching," Kaul said. "You post your problem on our site and say how much you're willing to pay to have it solved." This approach allows for "multiple responses, coming in faster" than if a company simply advertised in the newspaper for high-tech help, he said.
Many such services emphasize their commitment to vetting the rÃÆ'Æ'Ã,Ã,©sumÃÆ'Æ'Ã,Ã,©s of their free-lance participants to ensure that corporate clients get what they pay for. Chris Wong, CEO of Skills Village.com, another e-marketplace for free-lance workers, looks more closely at on-the-job experience than at technical certifications to determine whether independent contractors make the grade.
But if it's important for companies to understand what they're getting when they hire free-lancers, the same is true for free-lancers themselves. Jennifer Brower, a Texas-based free-lance Web designer who obtains work through FreeAgent.com, said independent IT workers should make sure job contracts include time frames that are as specific as possible on when work will be completed. Those contracts should also protect the worker from losing out on pay for half-finished projects if the company terminates the project on a whim, Brower said.
"Sometimes, the client will cancel the project because of budget problems or something," even after a free-lancer has worked on it for months, she said. "They might try not to pay you." Workers should negotiate a "completion clause" that ensures payment for the amount of work completed, she advised.
The IT free-lancers working for Phoenix don't have to worry about getting paidÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢,Ã,¬"after all, they saved Patton's business. "I would pay them a million dollars for what they did" in solving the virus problem, she said.
