InformationWeek

Here's the big picture: Your life is like an enterprise. And you're the chief executive (though not necessarily the one who writes the checks). To save time, save money, or tap into someone else's expertise, you may be "outsourcing" a multitude of pesky life details, from laundry, housecleaning, groceries, gardening, taxes, and educating your children to repairing your car, planning vacations, and determining your investments. Some of these chores are admittedly more tactical than strategic, but that's a key point. You may just want the execution and strategy in the hands of specialists, regardless of the taskýs importance. Even if you sometimes have nothing better to do.

If you do a cost-benefit analysis, most of the time outsourcing chores makes sense, just as it often does in your job. True, there are more than a few exceptions. And, of course, you get what you pay for. If you "outsource" a family meal to Burger King, rather than to, say, your favorite Chinese restaurant or chic Italian trattoria, you can pretty much assume the cost savings won't be offset by the benefits. (No offense to my son, who thinks Whoppers are haute cuisine.)

What's coming in five years that isn't here today?

Errands: Even today, services such as Kozmo.com and Urban Fetch are offering urbanites one-hour deliveries of books, videos, food, and beverages. Webvan, which is making its name as a grocery delivery service, proposes to also deliver dry cleaning and books to urbanites and suburbanites. This is just an appetizer. In several years, you will be able to customize local deliveries to suit your taste, rather than just order from a checklist of services. Customer-relationship management systems will undoubtedly push the personalization even deeper than it is today. Think ahead five years: Do you want your family snapshots to form the basis of a personalized digital family album? The delivery service ought to track that. Do you want all your meals pre-prepared into a balanced diet so you can shed weight or lower your cholesterol level?

Life decisions: A litany of specialists will come online to help you make life decisions on a just-in-time basis. These services include legal expertise, tax strategies, health advice, and personal shoppers who specialize in areas such as home repair and household appliances. My hope is that a negotiating service will come online to advise me on how to handle my cable provider! While examples of these can be found today, including for automobiles and home mortgages, it's likely that brand names will develop in these spaces, and the value proposition will turn from murky to compelling. This information could be provided today, but there's a technical hurdle--people like to see who is giving them advice. Broadband will enable this breakthrough, and two-way or interactive streaming video will provide the answer.

Remember the videophone that never happened? AT&T and America Online certainly are betting heavily that we'll see it within five years, this time using IP over broadband lines. Cool stuff, but it won't matter much in the long run how you receive this new class of LSP experiences. What will matter is whether it frees you up to enjoy your family or your true life passions (which one hopes aren't tied solely to your computer).

And yet many IT managers have learned firsthand just how difficult it is to manage multiple suppliers. Think about it: As more people own various "processes" in your life, the time you save simplifying your life may go into managing these services. You may end up needing an LSP to manage the other ones! Can you imagine negotiating or trying to enforce service-level agreements with life service providers?

Competition in the services industry and further venture-capital investment will drive these developments forward. And there's another catch: As early adopters, we also need to use today's available services, even if they're only 80% of the way there. These LSPs need to walk before they can run.