Telecommuting: express lane or side road? - Industry Trend or Event

Communications News, June, 2001

Telecommuting among enterprises may be far from replacing traditional workplaces--but companies facilitating telecommuting services claim they are seeing an increased demand in the market.

That flies in the face of a Cutter Consortium study of Fortune 1000 companies. Nearly all IT executives from 30 of those companies indicate their enterprises allow telecommuting--but add that only a small percentage actually adopted this style of work. More than half of the companies have between 1% and 5% of their workforce telecommuting. Companies with 21% to 50% of their employees telecommuting make up 17% of the respondents--with another 13% having no telecommuters.

In addition, none of the companies have full-time telecommuters. "The far more common scenario is being unable to travel to the office due to bad weather, a sick family member or another type of personal emergency," says Ed Yourdon, Cutter business technology council fellow, adding that one-third of the respondents view telecommuting as a necessary evil.

Telecommuting industry officials, however, are seeing strong growth among enterprises. "Our customers and prospects are Fortune 1000 companies across the board, representing a wide variety of industries," says Joan Fazio, iPass director of product management. "The demand that iPass has seen, based on feedback and requests from these companies, counters the conclusion of the Cutter study and indicates that the number of telecommuters is increasing."

Fazio observes another telecommuting trend: "Users are moving beyond dial-up to high-speed access wherever available. While the road warriors"--who use portable access devices while traveling--"are our primary target users, telecommuters represent a growing segment of our business." iPass offers enterprises client software that enables telecommuters to use a familiar interface to access corporate resources via their DSL connection at home.

Advantages of telecommuting cited in the Cutter survey include increased flexibility for workers; attracting workers not otherwise available for employment; decreased time and money wasted on physical commuting; burdens on working parents eased; increased productivity; and reduced absenteeism and office space requirements.

Telecommuting is not without roadblocks--among deterrents to enterprise acceptance are supervision and security concerns; conflict between work and home life; technology speed and cost; the need for face-to-face interaction with customers; problems with insurance and tax deductions; government regulations; and safety issues.

"From an IT manager's perspective, telecommuting represents a necessary evil because he has road warriors who need remote access through laptops or PDAs, in addition to the telecommuters who use home computers," notes Fazio. Telecommuters choosing their own software can create a further headache. IT managers can give remote users a single client interface for multiple devices, and an easy VPN integration to secure connectivity, she adds.

Placing telecommuters' content on a server, instead of a home or laptop computer, erases a major security problem--and makes the content available to other portable devices, says Scott Welch of Centrinity, which develops groupware for integrated collaborative environments and unified communications. Telecommuting is part of the bigger trend toward increased computer mobility among workers, he adds.

"For a while, there were a static number of telecommuting devices--but we're going to see an explosion of devices," Welch says. "We're no longer going to be in a monolithic computer environment, but one that is incredibly disparate--and enterprises are going to have to support this."

[GRAPH OMITTED]