The Emergence of Telecommuting
by Robin Ambler, Deborah Nordin, and Anne Tavares
Note from Eric LePage:
This summer I taught INST 526-BY1 Making Connections: Networking, an online course in the Instructional Technology graduate program. My students were assigned a group writing project to be created in our Moodle course site using a course wiki (note: Moodle is an alternative course management system to Blackboard; wikis are web pages that group members could edit at any time as they worked collaboratively on the writing assignment). As an extra incentive, I held a contest in which I asked the class, if they wished to take part, to read each of the project papers and judge which paper (not their own) was the most well written, easiest to understand, and most knowledgeable about the assigned topic. The three graduate students in the byline above best exhibited these traits in their paper according to their classmates in the anonymous class survey I conducted. As the winners of this contest, I have posted their paper with their permission in this issue of Digital Bridges. As energy and travel costs rise, and Massachusetts legislators discuss cost-cutting measures such as 4-day workweeks for state workers, discussion of telecommuting couldn’t be a more timely subject …
The
term telecommuting was "coined by Jack Nilles in the early
1970’s to describe a geographically dispersed office where
workers can work at home on a computer and transmit data and documents
to a central office using telephone lines" (Webopedia, 1996).
During the 1980’s, as the personal computer became more
economical, reliable and accessible for household use, workers
began “moving the office to the home” (“Telecommuting”,
2008). At this point, electronic communications were made available
via dial-up access using the telephone line.
The World Wide Web, the world’s first web browser, and the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML Editor were introduced in the 1990’s. Along with the implementation of the WWW came the inception of the cable modem and broadband technologies at the turn of the century. (“Internet Time”, 2000). Today, utilizing a broadband or fiber optic connection such as cable, satellite, DSL or FiOS is a must have for the telecommuter. It has been estimated that “76% of eligible homes” (Evans, 2008) are using a broadband service to access the internet. This has allowed for a connection speed of up to 30 Mbps, up from the maximum connection speed of a mere 56 Kbps through dial-up.
The latest advances in computing and network bandwidth have allowed telecommuters secure, remote access to their company’s network. Due to major societal influences, it has become imperative for organizations to evolve along with the newest technologies. There are a number of applications and tools that have been developed and are continually being enhanced so that the telecommuter can work more efficiently and avoid physically bringing data back and forth from the workplace. Different types of methods and remote access applications can be used to allow telecommunication to take place.
One method is to provide a dedicated desktop machine within the businesses network environment. “Screen scraping” software is available to connect to that dedicated machine through the internet and allows for control of the machine’s desktop. “Screen scraping is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from the display output of another program” ("Screen Scraping," 2008). It is beneficial to the telecommuter because they are able to utilize all of the existing software on their desktop machine at their business’ office location from their home computer. Examples of available software for this type of remote access include LogMeIn, GoToMyPC, and PC Anywhere.
Another method is to provide a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection to the network, either through a company laptop or through the telecommuter’s home computer. “Basically, a VPN is a private network that uses a public network (usually the Internet) to connect remote sites or users together.” (Tyson, 2001) Once connected through the VPN connection, the employee has the ability to map network drives and work on files and folders that are contained within the network’s firewall. The computer used by the telecommuter must have its own license of the software being used, and needs to be configured for access to the VPN.
Software companies are developing products to fulfill the needs associated with the emergence of the virtual workplace. Microsoft has developed web-based software suites for growing businesses and big companies including the Business Productivity Suite that enables an Outlook-integrated exchange for emails, calendars, collaboration, messaging and video enabled Web-conferencing. Their Deskless User Suite offers a SharePoint portal with access to internal company sites and searches, and online exchange of emails, calendars, security filters and Outlook Web access.
Enabling telecommuting, which many employers and workers increasingly favor, is likely to be a selling point for the productivity and "deskless worker" tools within the Microsoft Online Services lineup (Wenzel, 2008). IBM has launched Lotus Sametime, an application that integrates collaborative communication and multimedia including: unified telephony, voice, video, instant messaging, Web-conferencing, e-mail, voice mail, and business processes and applications. Sametime is designed to accommodate the emergence of the virtual workplace, make users more productive, speed business processes, and reduce overall costs.
Connecticut state legislators instituted a telecommuting policy 10 years ago, but relatively few state employees currently work from home (140 out of 50,000 state employees have a telecommuting agreement). Republican state leadership is proposing a new telecommuting program, arguing that if more employees telecommute, the state’s budget deficit will be reduced while also minimizing the state’s carbon footprint. Some legislators in opposition however, wonder if the new telecommuting program will instead shortchange taxpayers in services and their wallets. These legislators suspect that employees will be less productive if they work from a remote site (Hartford Business, 2008). However, Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, contends, “There is abundant evidence that telework programs have a wide range of positive impacts on employees, their agencies and their communities. It is simply old-fashioned and outdated to think that employees cannot and will not be productive if they are not at a work site other than their office” (Federal Computer Week, 2008). Kelley’s reaction comes on the heels of recently proposed federal legislation (The Telework Improvements Act) mandating that agency workers be allowed to work off site at least 20 percent every two weeks.
Although there are still some legislators and company officials who aren’t convinced yet that telecommuting works, it’s hard to ignore the numbers. According to Dave Douglas, vice president of Eco-Responsibility at Sun Microsystems, the company’s 10-year old Open Work platform has made a significant financial and environmental impact. With Sun employees working off-site (either from home or various company-owned “drop-in” sites) three to four days a week, the company saved $68 million dollars in office-related expenses and trimmed carbon emissions by 29,000 tons in 2007 (BNET, 2008). Clearly for Sun, employees are trusted to work off-site, and the company, employees and the environment reap the benefits. Most recently, Bank of America, the nation's largest bank, introduced a telecommuting program called “My Work” designed to allow employees to work outside the office. Their request to employees is to “stay home and work wherever, however”. (Rauch, 2008) Therefore, we can see that due to the looming recession, and the state of our environment, telecommuting is gaining momentum as a necessity rather than a perk. Companies can save millions in expenses currently spent on renting and maintaining office space, and employees can save thousands in commuting costs. In addition to saving money, telecommuting can help us all work towards a greener planet.
Technologies that have enabled telecommuting in the business world are also playing a big role in transforming education. Charles Reed, Chancellor of California State University system — with 23 campuses, 46,000 employees and more than 400,000 students — envisions students becoming more like telecommuters (Olson, 2007). Educators identify many students as digital natives who don’t want to be reached and interact in traditional ways. Enhancements in technology and the development of online learning platforms such as Moodle and Blackboard improve instruction and learning as well as provide telecommuting opportunities for educators and learners. Distance learning technologies enable students and faculty to work on their own at home or at the office and communicate with each other via email, electronic forums, videoconferencing, chat rooms, bulletin boards, instant messaging, webcams, and other forms of computer-based communication.
What telecommunication tools will be applied in the future remains to be seen. With the virtual world continuing to evolve, the need for office space will decrease. The remote access revolution will allow corporations to allocate more flexibility for their employees. It will also increase the competitive job market, giving employers a broader selection of the most qualified employees. Telecommuting was trendy in the 90’s, has become more common in the 2000’s and some predict will become standard practice in the near future.
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