Introduction to Telecommuting: Notes From The Field in a Globalized Workforce
In 2002 I went to work at a research University in the IT department of one of it's smaller divisions. About 1/2 of my work ended up being on a project that was so big that almost no one on the project had ever worked on a project planned to be so large, cost so much, or last so long before. The University itself was effectively a multinational corporation (doing business "on the ground" in Asia, Europe, and "in the field" in many other countries), as well as maintaining several campuses in our region of the US, and also numerous out-buildings scattered throughout the city.
As the IT project spun up, the University ramped up staff who would assist with the magnificent software implementation, which was designed to replace "aging mainframe applications" in student information systems with a single, ginormous web application build in the still-new Microsoft .Net architecture. And as three hundred souls in the University started the effort at the same time the system vendor was doubtless coordinating a similar mobilization of resources, their parent offices in a distant U.S. city establishing communications links and business agreements with a development team in South-Asia.
Now before this project, the university was already a very, very complex environment. This is still true on many levels, in terms of it's cultural legacy as a neighbor, as an owner, as an organization and employer, and probably no more so than in terms of its oscillating politics between the more market-driven clinical and research divisions and the strained oversight and leadership roles that the central university administration (including central IT planning) is tasked with exercising over it all.
Now, I am not sure that I remember this entirely accurately, but I have to retell the story even if it is partially a legend. My understanding is that "we" (the research university) were contractually forbidden to communicate directly to the South-Asian developers, and had to pipe all communication through the project management layer in the vendor's home city. Naturally, with all the risk, variables, new technology, and the university and project management being what they intrinsically are, there were bugs and problems, running from minuscule to huge, numbered in the tens of thousands, and the project's development environments, hardware, operating system, software, staff and planning resources burgeoned in a matter of months into an even bigger morass of confusion and expense than had been widely anticipated. That's actually normal and inevitable, but it sure put pressure on lots of people, in lots of places.
And somewhere out there in South-Asia there was an employee at a software developer who was also applying to various U.S. schools. And this unlikely individual managed to cross a number of cultural and contractual barriers and for a few fleeting moments became a mutual ray of hope, a key conduit of information between this titanic software implementation project on the university side and the South-Asian programmers who were operating under many misconceptions and limited information. Briefly, the rules of work were swept aside and the marketplace of human opportunity took over and communication and problem solving surged ahead "damn-the-consequences".
Now, what became of the software implementation, the programmer/student, and the vendor is a worthy topic, but sadly will have to wait for [never]. What is significant about this example is that it qualifies the pending discussion of telecommuting and telework with an infusion of insight into the preposterous, manichean antagonism of industrial relationships. What kind of work place, or project, or team, with stakes as high as these, would ever tolerate the idea that Person A on a project will NEVER EVER communicate in ANY WAY with Person B? I know, I know, you are over-brimming with reasons: the software development life cycle requires that requirements be developed in a systematic way and limited resources need to only work on critical priorities, yadda, yadda.
And of course this is somewhat truish. But to you I will say back that the student/programmer and the university implementers didn't, couldn't, or wouldn't see the "big" picture. When it really came down to it, they saw the need to assert their own right and instincts to communicate, negotiate, solve problems, and pursue their own disparate agendas in the workspace. Now, add to this the recognition that the whole affair couldn't have happened thirty years ago, first because day-to-day work wasn't conducted with "personal" computers, secondly because technologically-mediated globalization over the internet didn't permit these kinds of labor relations back then, and thirdly because as a culture the university would never have let a key software development project leave the country. But clearly a lot has changed, and we live in interesting times where things have changed, and are continuing to change rapidly.
And with that, let's introduce the actors. On the one hand, "telecommuting" has promised a host of benefits, which have been promoted vigorously by a futurist named Jack Nilles, who coined the term in 1973, developed arguments and theories about it, and who founded a consultancy that assists businesses and other corporate entities in establishing telecommuting programs. These purported advantages fall into three main categories: personal economic benefits, macro-economic advantages, and increasingly security, environmental and quality-of-life advantages.
On the other hand are a series of constraints and obstacles that stand in the way of telecommuting and telework. Puckishly (or devilishly, if you prefer), these also can be grouped in exactly the same three main categories: personal economic problems, macro-economic problems, and increasingly security, environmental and quality-of-life disadvantages. These concerns have few evangelists or mentors; perhaps there is a weak following of labor organizers, self-prescribed "anarchists" and anti-globalization activists. But despite the surprisingly disparate cohesion of thoughts against telecommuting, it can be said that the wide-spread practice of white-collar, W-2 telecommuting has hardly taken hold, and if it someday does, it may turn out to be pallid, corpse-like genesis of shame, rather than a flowering of the individual.
In the end, what I hope to reveal or discover is a clearer picture of the whole theater and the ability to offer or make some insights into the immediate future. The paper was originally conceived to answer the question: Will widespread whitel collar telecommuting cause a national or international form of "blight" (in the sense of "urban decay"). The scope has shrunk dramatically since then, but in spirit the question remains, though I won't attempt to answer it.