Five years ago, as part of my research for the book on automation, Silicon Collar, I coined the term "Alt-Job". I saw millions of workers and small businesses in franchises like those of McDonald's or the UPS Store, selling products using the Amazon Fulfillment platform, developing applications for the iOS store. Of course, companies have long used staffing firms, but unlike for employees where they have moved to a single book of record, they have multiple systems for contract labor. Often, those are managed by procurement, not HCM so there is even less enterprise-wide visibility. Many of those systems also date back to the 1990s.
Companies have even less visibility to talent in suppliers, digital agencies, law and accounting firms etc. As I have written, we have moved to a "Clover-Leaf talent economy" but our systems provide little visibility to most of those leaves. BTW clovers can have many more than 4 leaves. Guinness World Records says one was found with 56 leaves and that range may be even larger for talent sources.
So, I was pleased to spend some time with Dan Beck and Annrai O'Toole, ex-Workday execs at the Rising event last October. They have started Utmost to bring more visibility to this growing, extended workforce. I advised them to not just focus on the staff augmentation component, but to also factor franchise, platform and other more recent and growing talent bases.
Of course, the world of work has turned upside down during the pandemic with so many people working from home, travel restrictions etc.
Given all this, it was nice to get a presentation from the growing executive team on their progress so far. I have extracted 15 minutes in the video below of a much longer session we had. I left out customer case studies - they are not public yet - and a few other sections.
It is a great start, and they are very global in reach for a startup. Their timing is fortuitous given they can now factor massive changes in the workplace in the last few months. They are also benefiting as an early player on the Workday Extend platform. As I wrote last week, the platform has grown even more in importance for Workday in the last quarter.
I look forward to seeing how what Dan calls their "global work graph" keeps evolving.
