{"id":6090,"date":"2007-11-15T07:31:48","date_gmt":"2007-11-15T07:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/outsourced-personal-assistant.html"},"modified":"2007-11-15T07:31:48","modified_gmt":"2007-11-15T07:31:48","slug":"outsourced-personal-assistant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/technology\/outsourced-personal-assistant.html","title":{"rendered":"Outsourced Personal Assistant"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\"><img decoding=\"async\" hspace=\"3\" align=\"left\" vspace=\"3\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/uploads\/outsourced-personal-assisitant.jpg\" \/>Some years back at TMC, we installed a large flat screen TV in one of our conference rooms and the person handling the job was ANDY OnCall. At the time I was not aware that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.andyoncall.com\/\">ANDY OnCall<\/a> was actually a franchise and the person installing our TV was not Andy at all. I was surprised but in the end it didn&rsquo;t really matter as the TV did get installed.<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">I started thinking of this experience as I have started to see a wave of new offshore personal assistant services pop up in India and elsewhere. Obviously when you outsource a personal assistant it becomes a lot less personal but does it matter if the job still gets done?<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">The services being provided by firms such as Brickwork and GetFriday are things you could hire an administrative assistant in the US to do&hellip; Book plane tickets, research the competition, or really anything else.<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">Not all customers are happy with these services based in India and subsequently at least one company has launched a similar serviced staffed by US college students.<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">This trend is just another example of how technology boosts productivity and allows tasks to be outsourced on a quite granular level.<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div style=\"MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt\">Check out this New York Times <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/11\/14\/business\/smallbusiness\/14assist.html?_r=1&amp;ref=technology&amp;oref=slogin\">article<\/a> for more. Photo courtesy of the NY Times.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some years back at TMC, we installed a large flat screen TV in one of our conference rooms and the person handling the job was ANDY OnCall. At the time I was not aware that ANDY OnCall was actually a franchise and the person installing our TV was not Andy at all. I was surprised<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[199,118],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6090"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}