Outsourcing proprietary work

May 13, 2008 12:05 AM

How can i outsource my job (or a portion thereof) if my job involves access to a very large, complex database that is not (currently) available outside the four walls of the company.

How can i outsource my job (or a portion thereof) if my job involves access to a very large, complex database that is not (currently) available outside the four walls of the company. The problem is twofold: 1. the physical logistics of making the database externally available by replicating several dozen gigabytes of data to an offsite location or providing external access via remote desktop over VPN and sanitizing confidential information. And 2. the legal aspects. Suppose the task is very mundane and I would like to outsource it without causing a giant stir at the executive level. I would want to involve as few NDA's and legal agreements as possible. I would assume that I am coming out of pocket and that management need not know nor care that the actual work was produced by someone other than myself. My ultimate goal is simply to offload more mundane tasks to someone else so that, in the end, I am able to focus on more complex tasks and accomplish everything that is thrown at me, thus making me look like a superstar come review time. Coming out of pocket would be a temporary, initial step to prove that I might be responsible enough to be granted a small budget to pursue later outsourcing via more legitimate means (i.e. fully-disclosed to and funded by management)

posted by jasmarc to work & money (8 comments total)

One thing you can do to restrict information access is put together some views that contain the relevant information only, and create a user acct that only has access to those views and nothing else. This is the user acct your subcontractor(s) use. I have done this in the past with success.

If you need your contractors to have update/delete access, then you'd need some additional safeguards.
posted by spatula at 12:13 AM on May 13, 2008

You can't.

Your goal of being considered "responsible enough" for anything including keeping your current job and not disclosing to your employer that you are providing access to this database to third parties are mutually exclusive.

Dishonesty and deception -- no matter how good your intentions, regardless of the quality of the work -- is not an asset. Also, the very fact that you are asking Metafilter about the logistics and legal aspects of this plan illustrates your lack of qualifications to undertake such a project, not to mention a lack of good judgement.
posted by l'esprit d'escalier at 2:55 AM on May 13, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]

Staircase has it right: there's no good way to do this. Your company may indeed be legally required to limit access this information, by a privacy policy, a contract (as with a credit card provider), or by law (HIPAA, etc.).

But out of curiosity, what are these "more mundane tasks"? If you tell us this, perhaps we can come up with solutions that don't involve putting yourself and your company in legal jeopardy.
posted by orthogonality at 3:47 AM on May 13, 2008

NDAs are agreements between people who own data and those who are being given access to it. Since you are apparently not the owner of this data I can't see how you have the right to create an NDA for a third party to sign. You would, at any rate, need to check your NDA/ Contract with your employer first. I doubt they would be happy about you sharing their data with a third party on a commercial basis.

If you consider your job boring your most realistic options are to either find another one or to work with your employers to make it more productive. They will have all manner of outsourcing options open to them and this may serve as a route for legally offloading some of elements you find tedious.
posted by rongorongo at 4:27 AM on May 13, 2008

Your proposition is super sketchy and should get you fired if you pursued it. If you can't do the amount of work you're given it's a management problem or it's your problem. You need to ask them to have somebody else do the mundane tasks, or you have to do them yourself.
posted by beerbajay at 6:08 AM on May 13, 2008

I don't want to pile on, here, but I agree this is a super sketchy proposition. Rather than prove you're management material and a responsible person it demonstrates a few negative things about you: your willingness to be a security hole, your inability to communicate with your management about a major strategic decision, your propensity to offer the appearance of performance rather than actual performance. I know anywhere I've ever worked, trying a stunt like this would get me canned. If anyone who's worked for me tried to pull this, I'd have them out the door within five minutes of hearing about it, probably set attack lawyers on their trail, and take as many "you'll never work in this town again" steps as I reasonably could.

If you have mundane tasks involving large amounts of data this is a golden opportunity to prove your resourcefulness by automating the tasks rather than a chance to hire cheap labor.
posted by majick at 8:29 AM on May 13, 2008

Thanks for the knock on the head, all. I do employ a lot of automation where I can via shell/batch scripting for those things that can be scripted and via AutoHotKey for more GUI-like things. And I don't consider my job boring, as someone suggested.

I enjoy scripting things as much as I can so that I can move as fast as I can onto *interesting* problems that I don't mind stopping to pine over and take my time on. It is, however, annoying when I hit a speed bump on something that I don't find interesting but that can't be abstracted away by some script (e.g. working with programs that do GUI layout but that have poor support for scripting or automation of any kind). I don't feel like I can't handle my workload (nor does anyone else). However, I'm not always happy with the proportionate amount of time spent on some activities compared to others.

I don't have evil plans to disclose all of my company's private information, which is exactly why I threw my question out to the hive. I was hoping someone might come up with good solutions to abstracting away those difficult-to-script type things *without* causing a big stir or revealing private information (Amazon Mechanical Turk or something?) Maybe some good solutions on data sanitization (like the comment about views).

If you use your own tools on the job, at the end of the day, no one cares what tools you used, where they came from, or how much they cost you. The person with the best tools gets the job done faster and moves on. I think the boundary of your tools as a knowledge worker, however, end where another person's eyes begin.
posted by jasmarc at 9:24 AM on May 13, 2008

Is access to the data actually really truly necessary? Could you create a set of sample data to supply to your outsourcees that would replicate the use of the data without providing any real data to them? If you take this approach, be sure ALL the sample data is really different from the real data - generate random numbers for all numbers and so on. When I used sample data in technical writing, I liked to use the names of long-dead writers - Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, and so on - which were recognizable as names but carried no legal baggage.
posted by kristi at 5:23 PM on May 13, 2008