Temporary staff agency for knowledge-based society: A new trend in Japanese mobile-phone industry

This paper describes a case of a small start-up agency on intelligent, knowledgeable temporary staffs in Japanese mobile-phone industry as a new trend in the field of IT industry in Japan. In the rapid progress of technology and market, many enterprises in IT industry are facing to a serious shortage of knowledge/knowledgeable-employees on technology and market. For example, in the mobile-phone industry, the number of account customers has been so rapidly increased and varieties of services and technologies have also been so drastically increased that the employees inside mobile-phone enterprises cannot cover the whole service and technology. Therefore, outsourcing labor force like temporary staffs has become so important in the industry. However, the problem is that it is not easy to obtain appropriate labor force with sufficiently intelligent, knowledgeable for IT industry and market. The case analyzed here implies a clue to solve this problem by flexible, autonomous decentralized organization on temporary staff agency and effective self-education system. The characteristics of such a start-up enterprise and their manner of absorbing/sharing knowledge are discussed.