Tracking Our Techno-Future >BY Norman H. Nie

American Demographics, July, 1999

We have recently entered an important new phase in the ongoing information technology revolution. Telecommunications, computation, and soon, new satellite technology, are coming together with a speed and potency never before imagined, driven by innovations that will create profound effects not only on how we live our daily lives but on the very fabric of our society and its institutions. What is more, the pace of these changes is just beginning to accelerate.

Who among us hasn't reflected on how some aspect of the new information age is changing our jobs, family lives, communities, or patterns of commerce? And it is precisely because of this all pervasiveness that it is difficult to build a meaningful essay on the potential social implications. Most such discussions tend to whirl off into the never-never-land of social science-fiction, vapid and void of real intellectual content. To make matters worse, we have almost no data on any of the relevant subjects to either shape the discussion or aid or constrain our imaginations. Moreover, there is not a single significant ongoing effort to monitor empirically either the dissemination of information technology or the resulting social changes it may be producing.

Still, to get some purchase on the future, we can home in on areas in which changes are already reflected by fragmentary empirical data and then explore the possible consequences of these changes. Consider, for example, the ongoing metamorphosis in the loci of the workplace-from the office to the home. A massive sociological transformation is already in the making, and it will be further fueled by the coming ubiquity of the Internet, vastly improved connectivity, and fundamental changes in the very nature of work.

I predict that by 2005, at least 25 percent of the American workforce will be telecommuters or home office workers. By this I mean full-time or near full-time workers-including the self-employed and those who work for wages and salaries-operating primarily out of their homes. As noted in this publication last month, estimates of the number and the very definition of current home office workers vary substantially by source; some data are also several years old- this in a world where the speed and cost of computation and connectivity change by the month. Still, one can arrive at a reasonable accounting with which to proceed.

High-end estimates include the one offered by Internet survey company Cyber Dialogue, which claims that there are currently some 15.7 million wage and salary workers (14 percent of the labor force) spending at least part of their work week telecommuting from home-up, they say, from 4 million in 1990. (Such an estimate is arguably too high because of their sampling methodology.) At the other end are numbers offered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The agency's most recent analysis reported that there were 10.1 million telecommuters and home-office workers, or 8 percent of the labor force, in 1997. (But this estimate is likely to be low by as much as 1 million, because of the ambiguity of their telecommuting question.)

Still, given the fact that two years have transpired since the BLS study, it is not unreasonable to estimate that the number in 1999 is approaching 13 million. And the trend will surely continue and accelerate during the next decade. As the BLS reports, the types of jobs likely to grow the fastest in the next five years are those most compatible with telecommuting, including computer software design, engineering, and many other information services jobs. As those of us who have managed these types of employees and companies have learned, it matters little whether the tasks are performed in the office down the hall, on the other side of town, or even halfway across the country. The computer code passes review or it doesn't; the documents are well drafted or they aren't; the customer's problem has been satisfactorily addressed or it hasn't.

When what one builds or processes is digital rather than material, when remote coordination is possible even if not preferable, and when expertise and intellectual resources can be easily shared at a distance, the cost of bringing everyone to a central site to work together overwhelms the remaining benefits.

In the largest part, the explosion of telecommuting will be driven by the self-interests of both the employer and employee. It is substantially less expensive to set up a worker at home than it is to do so in a centralized office. The cost of adequate speed connectivity, which has been the biggest impediment to the growth of telecommuting, has been gradually solved over the past few years. Already new telephony options and cable modems are yielding the same productivity as the office network, and for much less cost per seat, as we say in the computer biz.

And there are other, more significant benefits than the savings on the cost of office rent, furniture, and additional overhead. While studies are by no means definitive, the current wisdom is that up to half the commuting hours saved by telecommuting employees may be given directly back to the company as additional work hours. The Gartner Group estimates that telecommuting improves employee productivity by 10 percent to 40 percent.