Online/Off-site: utopia or unique strength?
Elsewhere in these pages I have introduced my "working style" as online/off-site, fully
aware that this concept is new, unusual and likely to be met with scepticism. As stated
before, the prime reason behind this is my somewhat limited physical mobility. But I
also indicated that, once tested, I found this approach eminently workable. Indeed it
has proven to be very cost effective and to avoid organisational disruption, which would
appear to commend it, even were the outlined restrictions not to apply.
In this article I attempt to describe and exemplify a related paradigm shift in most
professional activities, and explore some of the enabling phenomena and technologies.
Furthermore I introduce a tool I currently utilise to facilitate my "working style", of
course aware that "state of the art" in this respect is evolving at a tremendous and still
increasing speed.
Paradigm shift
Ever since mankind entered the employment based economy, the distinction between
residence and place of work became more or less self evident. In agriculture the
professional efforts obviously have to be performed where the crops grow or the cattle
graze. But in the artisan world too, cooperation between apprentice and master was
physical, requiring a common environment. The industrial revolution then reinforced this
need with its necessary localisation of mining, its concentration of manufacturing and
its infrastructure bound transportation networks (water, railways, roads, airports). Even
the shift into the services economy as the engine of growth did not materially change
things, paper based collaboration necessitating short distances.
The advent of the "paperless office", electronic information storage,
telecommunications, and virtual networking for the first time created the necessary
conditions for location independent "production". But nevertheless, changes in working
practice were slow to materialise, mainly because of man's inherent inertia.
Recently, however, rapid advances in technological sophistication, the advent of the
global economy, as well as environmental concerns, have triggered a paradigm shift
where the daily or seasonal commute at least became a subject of explicit choice.
One important trend is towards the home office, avoiding the ever increasing
unproductive travel time, saving on our limited energy sources, and enabling a
combination of family and work focus, thus allowing the re-entry of many more in the
value creation process.
Another is the need for effective and intensive every day collaboration and work-flow
sharing across vast distances. Here too, commonality of "need to know" rather than
collocation becomes key.
As always, a necessary condition for such a fundamental change, is the conscious
recognition that it can indeed be accomplished without loss of quality, convenience,
functionality or performance, which typically develops some time after the appropriate
tools and infrastructure have become available. In this case they need to span effective
verbal and visual communication, as well as the availability of simple and immediate
data, information and document interchange. Though most or all of these gating factors
have been met for some time, trust in their robustness is only now slowly gaining
ground.
Apart from the massive increase in functionality and performance of the
telecommunications infrastructure (both copper based and wireless), I believe a major
factor has been the explosive development of the Internet with its capability to channel
voice, chat, video, mail, document and data interchange, thus accommodating
collaboration at each level. Some proof points are the universal deployment of
webcasts, webinars and RSS-feeds for instantaneous world wide information
dissemination. Extremely enticing is the realisation, that the approach is equally valid
for person-to-person, intra group, intra company, group-to- group, business- to-business
and business-to-consumer linkages.
In my opinion it would not be an overstatement to characterise the fundamental nature
of this paradigm shift as on par with the move from individual ("hunter type") self
sufficiency to an excess exchange type economy in the early stages of societal
development, whereby its significance will need several more years to fully penetrate.
When it does, one could imagine that many of today's top concerns (depletion of the
earth's energy sources, detrimental gaseous emissions, climatic change, environmental
encroachment, etc.) may simply evaporate, although new ones will probably take their
place.
My "working style"
By necessity, but subsequently by choice, I have become an early adopter of the new
paradigm, putting to use many of the recent technological advances (e.g.
teleconferencing, video conferencing, EDI, e-mail, search engines, etc.).
But in this context I attribute pride of place to interactive screen sharing (concurrent
with video- or audio- conferencing), which illustrates much of the above and which I use
extensively. This allows me to set-up and maintain planned or ad hoc interactive
sessions with a remote contact (one-to-one) or simultaneously with a number of them
(virtual meeting), exclusively through the desktop device of each participant. It makes
available:
-
an audio link
-
a visual link
-
a chat channel
-
a shared desktop with all selected applications, at the simultaneous disposal of
each participant
-
a local copy of all results at the end of the session.
As such this tool actually improves on the quality and scope of collaboration,
communication and work- flow sharing experienced in a physical get together, without
the disadvantages, and automatically produces a complete record for further reference.
All interventions require target's explicit permission and thus completely safeguard
system security and confidentiality.
On the other hand, if the client so wishes, physical meetings remain an option, be it in
my office, or, after due preparation, at the client's site. For the latter purpose I also
have recourse to highly competent partners in each of the main target geographies.
1. About
