Self Service of core competences ?

In the nineties retruning to core competenties was the management mantra. Only doning what you are good at. Outsourcing all work that isn't a core competence, but does take energy. General Electric (GE) under Jack Welch made its (en his) fortune with it. He even stated that you should only be in the business were a company is number one or number 2. Otherwise there was no business sense. Outsource became a business that was a core competentie for some. Cleaning, physical security, cantine, booking of trips work all got outsourced.
This was also for the employee. He/she should be doing what he/she was good at. Specialisation was the necessary.
Of the last couple of years self service became a business approach. In this approach an employee is able to do the travel booking, expense sheets, hour spend bookings self into the system. Some of these tasks can be quite complex and need expert knowledge. Still the employee is made responsible for realisation of these tasks. This way the costs of these tasks can be reduced. In fact the company is minimizing the cost of the ousourcing, by having the employee by self doing part of the task.
To get a overview of the real costs these self service tasks should be booked in the hour administration as genuine tasks. The the actual cost of this saving can be seen.
If that is not done and the employee doesn't book the hours, the company is borrowing time credit from the employee. Worse could be the company is borrowing into the quality of the work of the employee. Either way the time spend on self service should come from somewhere.
Shorterm not booking the hourse would give alot off benefits to the bottum line of the company. Longterm companies could loose there valued specialists, because they have to do to much other work on their own time.

Maybe now is the time for employer to think about credits in the longterm perspective.
General Electric is not doing well in the credit crunch fallout at the moment:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/09/news/companies/colvin_ge.fortune/index.htm