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Save
the Planet -- Stay Home!
In
an Internet-friendly state like Virginia, there is
no excuse for so many people clogging the roads
when they could be telecommuting.
Our
publisher and his collection of Eggheads have had
a real field day with the pro-tax/no tax/more
concrete/ less concrete shenanigans of the General
Assembly and the Governor. In our humble opinion,
the debate thus far has not yet focused on the
radical changes of behavior that could be driven
by changes to the Virginia tax code. These changes
just might clear up the problem and probably
generate a few extra bucks for the aforementioned
politicos to haggle over as well.
During
former Gov. Jim Gilmore’s administration, Don
Upson was the Secretary of Technology. This was a
new post, and Upson was the first “SoTech” in
the Commonwealth, the nation, the planet and quite
possibly the galaxy. In light of these
interstellar responsibilities, Upson took his role
as visionary very seriously and was/is bright
enough to think up numerous ways in which
technology could be used to address the problems
of the day. Believe it or not, traffic in Northern
Virginia and the Tidewater Region was among those
problems. As much as he might have liked to on
some days, the Governor steadfastly refused to
pave over Northern Virginia as some of his critics
seemed to be suggesting. (He also had some
environmentalist types in his cabinet and some of
them noted that even the relatively few green
spaces and trees in Northern Virginia served some
beneficial purposes.)
The
Governor’s technology team had some significant
successes in developing the policy and legal
framework to make Virginia’s an
Internet-friendly, Internet-based economy. We even
did a few things to move the staid old
Commonwealth in the direction of electronic
government. The Governor coined the term
“Digital Dominion” and spoke of it often.
The
bureaucracy, always sniffing the wind, decided to
get on board and came up with some clever ideas to
Web-enable various and sundry government/governed
transactional processes so that citizens might not
have to drive to a state agency to stand in long
lines for services. E-government transactions were
(and are) less costly to conduct. But, and
here we run afoul of the same failures of human
nature that are at the heart of the missed
opportunities in the transportation debate, some
agencies decided they should charge the citizenry
an additional charge for these easy-to-
access-in-the comfort-of-your-home services. Upson,
in his usual calm, cool, and collected red-haired
manner, succeeded in convincing all that they
should not charge the governed more for a service
that was now costing the government less. If
memory serves, two public floggings and a hanging
was all the persuasion it took.
We
tell this story because it nicely sets up the
current mess. If we were somehow able to examine
the desks of all of the government and private
industry workers clogging the roads in the
Commonwealth, we would likely find, almost without
exception, two things: a telephone and a
Web-connected computer. If we were further able to
track back to the homes, condos, townhouses,
apartments and pup tents those poor folks reside
in when away from the office, we would, again
almost without exception, find the same two things
in whatever might pass for the home office. Thus
we could safely conclude that these were the
essential tools of modern life and that they
function more or less independent of location and
distance.
Because
Virginia is a relatively Internet friendly
environment, one can purchase Internet
connectivity largely equivalent to that found in
institutional environments. In other words,
Baconians, one can do nearly all of the same stuff
from “home” one can do from “work.” One
does not have to become one of the thousands of
poor slugs inching his/her way up the concrete
ribbons to park in a concrete bomb shelter, to
hold one’s breath in a crowded elevator while
riding up to the umpteenth floor of a concrete
blot on the landscape to fit into a carpet-padded
cubicle to turn on essentially the same computer
running the same operating system as the one down
the hall at “home” and then go find the
coffee and BS for 20 minutes with one’s fellow
slugs about how bad the commute was on that
particular day.
Telecommuting
is not a new idea. One of us discussed its
potential in a textbook written nearly 25 years
ago. It is also an idea that is being used
successfully in many organizations, including
ours. So the real villains are not the
aforementioned slugs but the organizations that
refuse to use today’s technology to address
today’s headaches.
With
just a modicum of modern managerial skill,
companies and agencies could easily keep up to 50
percent of their workers out of the office and off
the roads on any given day with little if any loss
of productivity and efficiency. As the use of SOLs
to measure learning has demonstrated, there is
more to achievement in the modern world than seat
time. If we can figure out how to change the
behavior of teachers and teenagers operating in a
stultified educational system, we can surely
figure it out for the world of work.
Having
both either managed or worked closely with outside
sales teams in years gone by, we can tell you that
there are many highly successful “knowledge
workers” who rarely see the inside of their
organizational offices. These folks are not hard
to manage; they need timely information, the
ability to get a decision quickly, good back
office support (which can also be provided either
on-line or over the phone), regular strokes, and a
compensation system that rewards extra effort and
a high level of results.
How,
you ask, do we get organizations to buy into an
alternate approach? Three-dollar-per-gallon
gasoline doesn’t seem to be doing it. We think
user taxes and fees are the answer.
Tax
codes have always been used to drive behavior.
They are the manner in which governments can
influence markets without being an actual part of
those market. We leave it to the clever
minds in Richmond to figure out just how to
structure such taxes and fees to accomplish the
desired result, but we feel confident it can be
done.
Some
will argue that we can’t tax the Feds and that
taxing federal workers for being on the roads will
cause them to move to Maryland. Problem solved;
they’re no longer on our roads! Some will argue
that taxing Virginia-based corporations for
causing their workers to slavishly go up and down
the highways each day will cause a glut in
commercial real estate as buildings empty out. The
tax code can address those issues as well and at
least a visitor might have some chance of being
able to find a place to park.
If
the Governor and General Assembly can spend 60
days playing political grab-ass and gotcha on the
transportation issue at the public’s expense,
they can spend the time to look at what technology
offers us in the way of a fundamental
restructuring of the world of work. Not technology
of the 22nd Century; stuff that is right here
right now.
To
paraphrase the ancient prophet: “Without vision,
the people sit in traffic jams.”
--
August 7, 2006
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