Coping with too many experts and specialisations

Although it is possible for a solution provider to build up valuable co-operative relationships with a pool of experts and specialists, even though he or she is not employing them full time, there is always the risk that the needed experts will be busy on some other project at the time they are needed. However, this is not an insurmountable problem because the solution provider can make an effort to ensure that he or she knows a sufficiently large pool of experts to have overlap or duplication of specialisation. This will allow alternatives to be substituted. This is similar to the strategy of the newsagent, who will ensure that there is enough spare delivery capacity to make up for any newspaper delivery boy or girl who doesn't turn up for work one morning.

This requires all solution provider to have a very wide and versatile range of contacts, where all types of expertise and specialisation is covered several times over. However, as all experts assembled for a solution have to be trusted to reliably and efficiently carry out their part of a solution, it will need the solution provider to be able to assess the quality of work of a very large number of experts. This could easily become the main work of many solution providers: searching for, assessing and maintaining contact with a large assortment of freelance technical specialists.

Another way a solution provider might deal with this problem is to go to an agency who specialises in maintaining lists of experts and specialists who can be called upon as and when a need arises. Such services are common in the bricks and mortar world, but, can be woefully inadequate in the highly specialised environment of digital technologies, where only an expert can recognise another expert. A curriculum vitae might be a good basis for taking somebody on with a view of long term employment, but, is totally useless for the selection of somebody to be brought in for a fast and efficient specialist function. More likely, a solution provider will not trust an agency, but, will seek the advice of a respected contact who is a specialist or expert them self and has maybe worked with another expert whom they can recommend.

This need for various kinds of expertise at short notice is common to all solution providers who work with virtual teams or outsource some of the work., so, it is likely to breed a layer of Internet middlemen who specialise in representing special categories of experts. These middlemen would then be specialists in their own right: specialists in recommending certain types of experts.

This will generate much Internet communication activity, where solution providers are searching for and setting up co-operative relationships with various middlemen whom they can trust to recommend expert services to them. Correspondingly, there will be many middlemen who will make a speciality of cultivating stables of experts whom they can recommend to the solution providers. In this way layers of middlemen will form between the experts and the solution providers such that the vast range of changeable expertise involved in e-commerce solutions can be comfortably handled in the same way that Berwick Street wholesalers handle the large variability of costume jewellery.

If the use of experts recommended by middlemen is seen in the context of an object oriented framework, each middleman can be thought of as inheriting the skills of all the experts and specialists they represent (their ancestors). Similarly, the solution providers can be thought of as inheriting all the skills of the middlemen and their expert ancestors. This leads to a conceptual jump that take you to thinking of the solution providers as not needing to deal with any experts or specialists at all. If the solution is of an object oriented design that is constructed and connected solely through message passing, the messages emanating from the solution provider can go via the middlemen rather than directly to the experts.

Working in this way, will see the main activity of a solution provider as an Internet communicator at the centre of a hub of middlemen, rather than as the communicator at the centre of a hub of niche experts. This will undoubtedly allow the solution provider to be less concerned with technical detail and so have more time available for working on higher level strategic issues.

The arrangement of solution providers dealing with middlemen, rather than the experts, makes sense if it is remembered that a solution provider has only so much time in the day. This time will be far more efficiently used if it is spent with people who have a wealth of inherited expertise, than it would be with experts who each had only a single speciality. This will result in the solution provider being able to apply a far greater amount of expertise to an e-commerce project, effectively making him or her more efficient and capable.

Middlemen, and the relationships they have with the experts, can be compared to the example of the virtual calculators. Just as several calculators can share the same calculating objects to provide a similar calculating capability, so, middlemen can represent the same experts. This will promote competition among middlemen, for clients and experts, where the most efficient middlemen will be the most likely to succeed. This competitive environment should produce a system that is self regulating and continuously evolving towards greater efficiency.

A solution provider ,working with several middlemen rather than individual experts, will have many other advantages. The middlemen can be chosen such that there is considerable overlap of the expertise available. Besides this, the middlemen will have a broader view of the total e-commerce environment than could be expected from dedicated experts who need to be narrowly focussed. By discussing an e-commerce project with a number of different middlemen, a solution provider will have access to a variety of different views and opinions. This will greatly broaden the base upon which strategic judgements are made. In this way, the risk of providing a short sighted or biased solution is greatly reduced.

The middlemen will of course need to take a profit, This they will do by taking a percentage of the expert's fees or adding a percentage to the expert's charge. This profit taking need not be excessive though, because of the efficiency by which the Internet allows middlemen to work. They will have few overheads and can work with many different experts and solution providers at the same time.he same time.