Yesterday's Wall Street Journal included an article on distributed work, prompted by the 3-day transit strike in New York City just before Christmas: Working at Home Gets Easier Advances in Technology Make Telecommuting More Feasible (By Christopher Rhoads and Sara Silver, 29, 2005; Page B4).

The article covers familiar territory: the drivers of terrorism, contagious diseases, and natural disasters; and enablers of high-speed bandwidth, new security techniques, and increased worker comfort with technology in general; the disablers, such as management's concern over reduced productivity.

But my favorite line takes a blunt look at reality:

"When you're checking email from a business center in a hotel or a cybercafe, you don't think twice about it," says Phil Montero, president of Montero Consulting, a North Andover, Mass., firm that helps companies with teleworking practices. "That's not telecommuting, that's just the way we work today."

Montero's example happens so often today no one bats an eye. And how often have you seen someone in the middle of a crowd, checking their Blackberries or making cell phone. Even dozens of years ago, office-based workers frequently took materials home to do tasks in their "off" hours. 

A report from Gartner demonstrates the math: "This year, 82.5 million workers world-wide have done their jobs at home one day a month, more than double the figure from 2000, according to Gartner Inc., a technology research firm. It predicts the figure will grow to more than 100 million workers by 2008."

The message is simple: Managers need to stop thinking distributed work is something they can decide to allow or not. It's simply reality, and the only decision they can make - are making every day - is whether they will support it and start enabling high knowledge worker productivity without regard to physical location. A simple starting point is to web-enable critical internal applications.

11:47:24 AM    
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