4
Telework and
Technology
One main theme of this book is that a substantial amount of telework can be accomplished effectively with only a telephone, paper and pencil as the relevant technologies. Yet, application of more sophisticated technology generally makes life easier, increases the amount of telework one can do, and makes telework available to more people. Furthermore, many, if not most, contemporary information workers now use computers and telecommunications every day. This chapter is about the impacts of technology on telework.
˘ General Rules of Technology
We don’t discuss the technology here at the level of detail of brand names, model numbers, or prices. The reason is simple. Information technology (computers and telecommunications) improves, in terms of performance per dollar spent—or decreases in cost per unit of capability, at an annual rate of between 25% and 30%. That is, the universal cosmic gadget that you paid $400 for this year will probably sell for about $300 or less next year, if it isn’t already obsolete. So, the process of turning a manuscript into a book that is manufactured and widely distributed, fast though it is, is too slow to keep up with technology details. Any market details printed here would be out of date by the time you read them. (However, you can get a better feel for what’s happening now by checking NetworkWorld’s teleworker pages.)
If a certain form of information technology is available today, but costs twice as much as you think you can afford to pay, wait a couple of years; it will be down to your price threshold. If it currently costs ten times as much as you think you can afford, wait about seven years.
This is simply a restatement of the trend mentioned in earlier paragraphs.
In Rule One we’re talking about hardware technology; things like mainframe-, maxi-, mini-, and micro-computers; telecommunications media, such as fiber optics lines and satellite dishes; and all the gadgets that plug into them. Software tends to follow more obscure rules. Suffice it to say that the great new software package that will finally help you to do that tricky part of your job will take from two to five times as long to appear as the manufacturers initially claim. Hence the well-deserved term vaporware.
Nevertheless, the software will finally show up, and of a quality sufficient to make it worth your investment. This leads to Technology Rule Two:
Always buy the best technology available to accomplish a certain job, even if it stretches your budget slightly. It is at least a partial guarantee that the technology will still be usable in three years. Don’t count on more than a three to five-year useful lifetime for computers or telecommunications interface equipment (such as modems), for other than very routine[1] information tasks—even though the IRS hasn’t yet recognized this fact of life..
However, all of the foregoing doesn’t really have much impact on the fundamental teleworkability of large numbers of jobs. It does have a major impact on some jobs, specifically those that need the latest high-powered hardware and software to keep ahead of the game. But computer power in 2001 is more than adequate for the vast majority of information tasks. This leads to Technology Rule Three:
The absence of a particular technology, beyond the fundamentals, is rarely a reason (or excuse) not to telework. Almost everyone can telework at least part of the time without any form of “advanced” technology. However, improvements over the fundamentals may enable both significant qualitative and quantitative improvements in telework.
All of the rules above have to do with deciding the level of technology required in a closed system. By that we mean, all other things being equal, you only have to worry about Rules One through Three. But, in many situations it is not the case that all other things are equal; you exist in a competitive environment. If you are in that situation, you also have to consider Technology Rule Four:
Given equal human and economic resources, the person who has the technology best suited for the job wins. If you are able to do the work faster, with higher quality, at lower cost, or with less strain than your competitor, then you have a competitive advantage. The key question: is the cost of the additional technology (including training) less than the value of the increased competitive advantage? If it is, then the expenditure could be warranted.
At the same time, don’t forget that new
technology can have a price significantly beyond its purchase cost: time. First, it takes time to learn how to
use it to do the tasks for which you purchased it. Often, the technology fails
to meet your expectations in one or more respects. As a result, less time than
expected is shaved from those established tasks that the technology was
supposed to help. In extreme cases, that user surliness may make you take even
longer to do the task with the “improved” technology than without it.
Second, it takes even more time to invent new things to do with the technology, or to learn how to do them. Third, the cost of producing the “improved” results may exceed the benefits received. How many times have you spent extra minutes or hours at the computer unnecessarily tweaking that letter or spreadsheet, with no discernible difference to the famous bottom line?
But telework does have an effect on that process, as stated in Technology Rule Five:
Telework generally decreases the start-up costs of adoption of a new
technology; computer-based technologies in particular.
This is partially the result of greater accessibility. Many offices still have fewer than one personal computer per computer user. In those cases, at least for home-based teleworkers who have personal computers at home, learning the new technology—and inventing new applications for it—is done mostly at home rather than in the principal office.
I have been told repeatedly by teleworkers that the ability to try a new technology at home, without the fear of embarrassment by the snickering power users at the principal office, can be a powerful incentive to someone who is technology-wary. Hence, the learning and innovation time is significantly compressed. This is one of the components of the improved effectiveness demonstrated by teleworkers. Further, the increased emphasis on specifying results (rather than concentrating on a specific procedure that may or may not produce the results) tends to diminish the amount of time wasted in output overkill. Rule Five is particularly important in organizations that ordinarily under-train their employees; that is, most U.S. organizations.
Technology Rule Six is critical:
The technology needed for full-scale successful telework is roughly the
same as that required in the principal office—plus some more
telecommunications.
No magic here. If you regularly need it in the office, you will probably need it in the home office or telework center. The hidden benefit here is that there may be no need for duplicate technology. A combination of “older” technologies, such as voice mail and paging, combined with computer sharing in the principal office, possibly with removable hard disks for teleworkers and/or teleworker ownership of their own machines, can make the actual startup cost of technology for teleworking range from quite low to nonexistent.
You should also keep in mind Technology Rule Seven:
Telecommunications networks are the freeways of telework.
If your organization is not extensively intra-connected by digital telecommunications networks now, it soon will be, if it is to stay in business. The emergence of increasingly sophisticated telecommunications networks—and increasingly uniform international telecommunications regulatory policies—will make telecommuting and teleworking practical for almost all information workers around the globe in the next decade (or so)[2]. The Internet in particular has changed everything.
Telecommunications networks for telework can range from the familiar ubiquitous public switched telephone network (PSTN) and all its generally available services (call forwarding, conference calling, call waiting, voice mail, paging, caller identification); plus various forms of mobile telecommunications; through the all-digital ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) system or switched digital services interconnecting both individuals and arrays of LANs (Local Area Networks); to the next steps: DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), cable modems and ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). The mode of telecommunications can be as simple as voice only, or escalate through voice-and-graphics, and various forms of synchronous and asynchronous teleconferencing. Each of these technologies generally follows Technology Rule One, so that a technology that seems to be out of reach today could be business-as-usual in a decade or less.
Finally, lest you get overly excited by all the possibilities out there, observe Technology Rule Eight:
There is no substitute for uniform company technology standards.
At a minimum, the software used by teleworkers should be file-compatible[3] with the software in the principal office. For example, if the principal office uses Macintoshes and one or more teleworkers use PC-compatibles, or vice versa, make sure that one end or the other has software that allows transparent file transfer, either by floppy disk or modem. This problem will recede as (and if) more software becomes platform-independent, but it is a common issue in many organizations today.
Figure 4.1 Technology Ownership Rates
Keep these rules in mind—or on your wish list—as you decide what technology is required for a given level of teleworking.
˘ Reality Tests
Brief descriptions or statements of the type of technology needed for telework are scattered throughout this book. The rules just given cover types of technology needed to perform various teleworking tasks. Now, let’s see what is happening at present in non-high-tech, real world organizations.
First, look at some of the results of a survey of a few hundred telecommuters and non-telecommuters, mostly mid-level managers or professionals, concerning the utility of certain types of technology to their work. One test of the importance of a technology is the extent to which it is personally owned/paid for by the telecommuters. Figure 4.1 shows the status late in 1992 for a group of -home-based telecommuters and non-telecommuters in a large U.S. metropolitan area, all working for the same large organization. On average, these telecommuters had been working from home for about one year at the rate of slightly more than one day per week.
Figure 4.2: The ability of technology to make work easier
The results in Figure 4.2 must be viewed with some reservations because not all of the technologies, such as voice mail and electronic mail, were readily available to the participants in the survey. Voice mail in particular tends to enhance teleworking in organizations that have it generally available—yet it is not usually owned by the teleworkers. Further, the survey respondents’ jobs covered a very wide spectrum. Some job types are much more dependent than others on a specific technology. Note that price does not seem to be a dominant factor here. Although the most-often-owned technology is answering machines (underlining the importance of voice messaging); personal computers and printers, costing several times as much, rank second. This also demonstrates Rule Six: 74% of these telecommuters owned their own personal computers at the time the survey was made. At the beginning of telecommuting for this organization, half of the applicants already owned their own personal computers.
We also asked the same people how much easier each of these technology types would make their work. The results of that question are shown in Figure 4-2. The scale ran from 1 (it has no effect on my job) to 5 (it makes my job significantly easier).
The clear conclusion from these figures is that personal computers, their main peripherals (printers and modems), and facsimile machines should be key components of the future telecommuter’s equipage. The differences shown in Figure 4.2 between telecommuters and non-telecommuters are statistically significant only for modems, a further check on Rule Six.
Figure 4.3 The expected impact of technology on increasing telecommuting
Finally, these same telecommuters and non-telecommuters were asked their opinions as to the impact of each of these technology types on increasing the amount of telecommuting they might do from home. The results are shown in Figure0-3. The asterisks after the names of the technologies indicate that the differences between telecommuters and non-telecommuters are statistically significant.[4]
The interesting conclusion to be drawn from the graph is that non-telecommuters have expectations of the effect of technology that are not met in reality. Although both groups feel that added technology would increase the amount of telecommuting that is possible for them, experienced telecommuters are more conservative about the likely extent. This is an empirical test of Rule Three above; lack of a particularly nifty technology may not be as impairing as you might think.
˘ Technology Trends
The previous material concerns the situation in an average-tech organization in the early 1990s. There are some very high-tech organizations using teleworking, as well as some almost no-tech outfits. All of these are successful in the teleworking they do. But, as stated earlier, there seems to be a connection between the level and scope of teleworking in an organization, and the level of technology they use. Here are some general statements about trends in technologies that are particularly suited to telecommuting and to that broader application, teleworking.
Ř Computers
Although about one-third of telecommuters in the late eighties could telecommute at least one day per week without computer assistance, that number has been steadily eroding. Teleworkers are increasingly likely to use computers while teleworking simply because the percentage of information workers who use computers daily in traditional offices is growing.
Figure 4.4: Performance improvements of microprocessors
Technology Rule One is the main motivator for this. Personal computers are delivering unprecedented information processing power to the desktop, regardless of the location on the desktop. By the year 2000, personal computers will be able to perform almost any task that was mainframe-based in 1990 (with the possible exception of serving out terabytes of data on line). All of this stems from the growth in power of microprocessors, the “brains” of personal computers. Figure 4.4 tells the story. Similar trends hold for any microelectronics devices, such as memory chips.
In effect, this means that, for most kinds of jobs, the jobholder can soon (if it hasn’t happened already) have all the information resources of the principal office at home or in a telework center. Where the telecommunications network can’t support enough information transfer, work can be carried between the principal office (if it still exists) and the telework office via some magnetic or optical storage medium. The number of options for this information transfer is continually growing: floppy disk, Zip™ disk, removable hard disk, recordable/erasable CD-ROM, WORM disk, and PCMCIA[5] storage card, to name a few.
Another critical
outcome of this microelectronics capability growth is desktop video
conferencing. That is, the average desktop or laptop personal computer can now
display the boss and/or the rest of the gang at the principal office in living
color, full motion, and stereo sound, given the proper network connections. In
1997, the cost of this form of point-to-point desktop videoconferencing using
ISDN was about $1,400 per seat. By or before the year 2000, look for a price of
about $500 per seat. Of course, videoconferencing at lower resolutions and
frame rates can now be had, using ordinary phone lines, for under $250 per
seat.
Is this an improvement or what? Now the boss can resort to the classical fallback management technique: call all the teleworkers and see that they look busy. More to the point, lack of visual contact will no longer be an excuse for prohibiting teleworking.
Further, with multipoint videoconferencing[6] many meetings can be held with all of the participants “present” and no two of them occupying the same room. Will the outcomes be the same as in traditional, everyone-in-the-same-room meetings? We don’t know the full answer to that yet, but some outcomes will be better, if only because many meetings would otherwise not be possible, given the schedule and location conflicts of any group (larger than two) of busy people.
The danger of all this information processing power is that now we can make major mistakes with lightning speed. However, that danger is common to all users of personal computers, not just teleworkers. Many teleworkers have told us that they are far less likely to make computer mistakes while teleworking because of the major decrease in interruptions, as compared to life in the traditional office.
˘ Telecommunications Networks
Telecommunications networks are the freeways of teleworking. At present there are two broad kinds of networks: local area networks (LANs and wide area networks (WANs. As the names imply, one concentrates on shipping information around a relatively restricted area, while the other has a much broader scope. You have been using WANs for a long time; the most common WAN is called the telephone system. The problem is that these two kinds of networks encompass a bewildering array of different and often incompatible technologies, from good old analog voice transmission at 3 kHz to digital data transmission at gigabit-per-second[7] rates.
As far as telework is concerned, the fundamental question is, what has to be telecommunicated? The answer, for most late-1990s teleworkers, is voice messages, text data and numbers that have been generated “off line.” In both of the latter cases, the text and data are represented on the computer by a small number of bits per information element. Therefore, none of these modes of information transfer requires much in the way of transmission capacity. However, that relatively simple demand on the transmission medium is changing.
One of the key forces for increasing
performance demands on telecommunications networks results from the trends in
computers: 
the
move toward high-resolution graphical user interfaces (GUIs—pronounced
“gooeys”). A GUI can require thousands of times more data than a system that
just transmits codes for characters that are displayed on the screen via a
character-memory chip. That is, where a DOS character-mode system simply
transmits a byte for each character that is displayed on the screen, a GUI
system must transmit a picture of that character. Much more complicated. In
addition, GUI systems generally employ color (which further triples the data
load) and increasingly complex graphics, so that a super VGA screen requires
about 2.4 million bits of data (1024×768×3) to display one screenful of
information. It needs to do this about 70 times per second. This can be a
problem. Even with a modem transmitting at 28,800 bits per second, a GUI
interface with a distant LAN can seem painfully slow if the software requires
this rate of screen updating.
Ř Wide Area Networks
The first thing to remember is that good old analog transmission is going away; the telephone system is going digital worldwide, although the transition process may extend into the twenty-first century. The most common telework telecommunications appliance today is the modem. Its sole purpose is to convert the digital output of a computer to analog signals capable of being transmitted on the telephone WAN and vice versa. Various tricks can be used in this process so that a phone line limited to voice transmission (nominally covering the frequency range from 300 Hz to 3 kHz) can be stuffed with 14.4 kilobits per second or more—but not much more. Connecting a high-end personal computer to a modem is sort of like connecting a fire hydrant to a garden hose—lots of ambition but not much production.
The replacement to the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS or PSTN, for you acronym fanatics) is, first, ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) then ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), frame relay and ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). All of these WAN technologies are totally digital and deal with message switching. One consequence of this is that you get to throw away your modems and replace them with other interface devices that plug into the phone lines. The more important consequence is that you can send any kind of information over the same telecommunications line—voice, computer data, video—and have it received reliably at the other end, assuming, of course, that the other end knows what to do with it.
Table 4.1: Alternative data transmission media
|
|
|
|
|
|
Transmission limit |
|
POTS (28.8 modem) |
point to cloud |
1 |
28.8 |
28.8 |
None |
|
ISDN |
point to cloud |
|
|
|
18,000 ft. |
|
US BRI |
|
|
|
|
|
|
B channels |
|
2 |
64 |
128 |
|
|
D channels |
|
1 |
16 |
16 |
|
|
US PRI |
|
|
|
|
|
|
B channels |
|
23 |
64 |
1472 |
|
|
D channels |
|
1 |
64 |
64 |
|
|
European PRI |
|
|
|
|
|
|
B channels |
|
30 |