Work without the workforce: is a do-it-yourself economy healthy?

It's an odd paradox that accompanies business technology if you think about it: Companies go to their paying customers and inform them they will be handing over to them their most boring, repetitive, and thankless work -- and customers are only too eager to do it.

There's no denying it; the be-all and end-goal for many organizations is to bring self-service to all aspects of customer and employee interfaces. That is, customers do their own data entry work. The fill out their own insurance applications. They do their own travel booking. They pump their own gas. They become their own IT administrators in their homes or offices. They even check out and bag their own groceries (though there has been some pushback here). As employees, no matter how high up on the organizational chart, they do their own word processing and editing. They even do their own medical research. The emergence of 3D printing may even result in customers doing their own manufacturing.

Welcome to the DIY, do-it-yourself economy. Self-service is considered the holy grail of cloud, analytics, SOA, social networking and Web commerce. There’s no disputing that there's plenty of ROI potential. In the IT world, data entry is grunt work, and I’m sure most companies are only too glad to get data entry off their hands.

This may offer a partial explanation as to why the actual size of the workforce has remained flat over the past decade (declining 1.1%), while corporate profits, GDP and productivity have risen. Much of the grunt work that required thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of workers on payrolls to accomplish has been shifted to the customer. And few customers are complaining.

In a recent New York Times article, Craig Lambert identified such scenarios as "unpaid shadow work," in which any and all customers, including lawyers, end up "performing the unskilled, entry-level jobs of supermarket checker and bagger free of charge." The original term "shadow work" -- meaning any unpaid labor -- came from Austrian philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich, in his 1981 book of that title.

Lambert ponders whether we attempting to rebuild an economy on a base of what is essentially unpaid labor:

"The conventional wisdom is that America has become a 'service economy,' but actually, in many sectors, 'service' is disappearing. There was a time when a gas station attendant would routinely fill your tank and even check your oil and clean your windshield and rear window without charge, then settle your bill. Today, all those jobs have been transferred to the customer: we pump our own gas, squeegee our own windshield, and pay our own bill by swiping a credit card. Where customers once received service from the service station, they now provide 'self-service' — a synonym for 'no service.' Technology enables this sleight of hand, which lets gas stations cut their payrolls, having co-opted their patrons into doing these jobs without pay."

Of course, the move to self-service also is one of convenience and empowerment, enabling customers to be able to make more choices on a 24x7 basis. Technology has parceled out tasks to a great unpaid workforce, but in return has put those "workers" in charge in many respects. In the process, many roles with organizations have been elevated as well. For example, call center representatives have moved toward taking on more consultative roles and away from routine, mundane queries that can be answered by an automated system. There's also a self-reliance ethic to the ability to address one's own problems or build solutions.

The bottom line, then, is whether self-service technologies are part of a technology "sleight of hand" as Lambert describes it, or as something that has put consumers -- and employees -- more in charge of their own well-being.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com