Working towards invisible travel

For many years now one of the characteristics of work has been that it is a place you go. This requirement has lead to many logistics problems that are continuing to escalate.  We go to work earlier and earlier to find space on crowded roads and in car parks or stand for hours on crowded trains and station platforms.  Not only is this not convenient, rising train fares and petrol costs are making the journeys more costly.  This is not the only cost either as there is significant environmental cost not just as pollution but also as noise and visual intrusion.  The truth is that if we continue as we have been with rising world populations travel will be halted by global gridlock.

Many technological solutions to this problem are being sought in intelligent traffic systems; self driving cars; interactive car networking systems and of course environmentally friendly vehicles.  These may help, certainly in the short term, but the best way of reducing the traffic is for people not to travel in the first place.  Most modern companies have remote access systems but how much do they really use them?  Although I see some technology companies using remote access systems aggressively my feeling is that most “normal” companies see remote access as a nice to have for emergencies rather than as a replacement for travelling to the office.

Sometimes it is the reliability,speed or ease of use of the solutions in place that promote this viewpoint, but more often it is the organisations view of work that is at fault.  Company culture drives a viewpoint that says if you are not in the office you are not working.  Working from home is seen as a euphemism for having a hooky day off and thus frowned upon.  As long as you are in the office you are deemed to be working and all is okay, yet in this lies the requirement that IT groups stop you “playing” with things that are not work.

To truly utilise mobile computing, companies are going to have to change they way they work.  ROWE - Results Only Working Environment was a concept that was one way of achieving this, people are paid for what they deliver, not where they sit.  The theory behind this makes sense however it’s failure to catch on (yet) demonstrates that this is a hard problem to crack.  In it’s extreme ROWE could even become something like Amazons mechanical turk a system that allows posters to submit work that freelance individuals can complete and return.  Companies like pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly have used this kind of concept to dramatically reduce their development costs, posting work and paying a bounty for the first solution to the problem.  These solutions could have applications for many companies, and an impact on the world of work that is currently difficult to predict.

I believe these changes will come in the long run, but in the meantime the key is to work with business managers to show them ways in which they can enable homeworking and yet still feel that the work is happening.  This means connecting HR, Business and IT together.  If it is done well for one part of your organisation then the resulting savings will boost the results of that area leading to others wanting to adopt it.  Just providing the tools and sitting back and waiting for them to be used, as IT departments have for years, cannot change the paradigm.  You have to work at it.