Amazon, Accenture and Anthropology

Living a bi-polar work life - 250K miles of air travel a year on average, combined with  a home office  for over a decade - I  enjoy watching trends  around how work  moves to people, and people move to work.

The Accenture/Deloitte model has involved taking teams to client sites. The Infosys/Wipro model has involved taking work to large campuses in lower cost markets. But both models involve carefully recruited and trained employees to do client related work.

At the other extreme, the open source movement relies on a global community of developers. Marketplaces like elance allow for similar leverage of a body of global practitioners that can do a wide range of projects.

So along comes Amazon Mechanical Turk which allows for micro, task level sharing with s community of potential contractors. Cleverly branded as "artificial artificial intelligence", it allows anyone with spare (and relevant) labor cycles to help out at reasonable price points.

Giant teams, giant campuses, giant communities. Different deployment models - each with their own roles. Each allowing for different work/life dynamics.

Maybe corporations also need to rethink players like amazon, ebay and Google. We have viewed them as access to consumers. We should also view them as access to labor.