The
Network of Space
Technology
is transforming the relationship between people and
where they work. To fulfill the promise of telework, the
Commonwealth needs to invest less in asphalt and more in
bandwidth.
John
Vivadelli, the CEO of AgilQuest, Inc., propounds a
vision for the workplace of the future. Gone are the
days when people, in lemming-like masses, all hop in
their cars at the same time, drive to their offices
along the same congested thoroughfares, do their jobs at
central office complexes, then repeat the grueling
commute on the way home …. day after mind-numbing day.
In
the world that Vivadelli imagines, employees have access
to a "network of space” that allows them to work at the
most efficient locations. “People have different kinds
of workplace needs on different days, depending on what
they’re doing,” he explains. Some mornings, they
might work from home, linking to the office by
telephone, e-mail and high-bandwidth video. Other
mornings, they might zip over to a satellite office a
few minutes away, plug into a work station they’d
reserved the day before, and meet with co-workers at a
conference room there. Then they might complete the
commute to the main office when the roads are clear,
shaving a half hour off the normal drive time.
“Virginia
has
the [highway] capacity to get people where they need to
go,” says Vivadelli. “We just don’t have it for 8:00
a.m.
in
the morning.” By changing the way we work – using
office- and conference-
scheduling tools that
AgilQuest
provides -- Virginians can redistribute the demand for
transportation capacity away from its peaks at
8:00
a.m.
and 5
p.m.
to
other hours of the day.
Virginians
have two broad options for coping with its increasingly
stressed transportation system. We can raise taxes by
literally billions dollars a year to finance the massive
road and transit projects enumerated in regional 20-year
transportation plans that will only blunt, not reverse,
the severity of traffic congestion during rush hour. Or,
like Vivadelli, we can think creatively about how to
reduce and redistribute the demand for scarce
transportation capacity.
Thanks
to innovations in the private sector, demand-side
transportation strategies are gaining momentum in Virginia.
Bacon’s
Rebellion has profiled new businesses that deliver
real-time information about traffic conditions to
subscribers’ PCs and cell phones. We’ve also
highlighted an Arlington
County
initiative to promote car-sharing services. But when it
comes to sheer, society-shifting potential, none of these
compares to what Vivadelli and other telework advocates
are proposing.
The
idea of using telecommunications to link workers with
their work has come a long way since the 1990s, when
early experiments were found deficient and the concept
was largely written off as a public policy option. In
the past five years, high-speed Internet connections
have been deployed widely, reaching hundreds of
thousands of Virginians, and initiatives are underway to
make big bandwidth nearly ubiquitous.
Collaboration-enabling technologies have matured, making
it possible to coordinate activity, project video images
and share content for significantly less cost than it did a
few years ago. Simultaneously, the cost of traffic
congestion has nearly doubled in Virginia’s
major metropolitan areas, increasing the pay-off for
telecommuting strategies.
But
the most important breakthroughs since the 1990s have
been largely conceptual. The notion of
“telecommuting” is yielding to the notion of “telework.”
The 1990s idea of employees working at home is giving
way to the 2000s vision of mobile workforces equipped
with cell phones and wireless laptops, working anywhere,
anytime: at the corporate headquarters, at home, at a
satellite office or on the road. Where
“telecommuting” provided mainly a social benefit by getting
people off the highways at rush hour, thus reducing the
strain on the transportation system, a mobile workforce
does that and slashes corporate investment in
office facilities and enables employers to
re-engineer work processes.
Getting
one
Northern
Virginia
worker off the road during rush hour would save the
Commonwealth some $2,800 or more per year in the cost of
expanding and maintaining the transportation
infrastructure, says John Starke, president of the
Telework Consortium based in
Loudoun
County. You
can add another $2,000 a year in social benefits from
the reduction of gasoline consumption and air pollution.
Then consider the productivity gains for individual
employees who spend less time commuting: a 10 percent
gain for a $50,000-a-year worker amounts to $5,000 a
year. Finally, toss in thousand of dollars more by
reducing the need for office space made possible through
Vivadelli’s “network of space” and other process
improvements. Starke sees a $30,000 annual value per
employee potentially flowing from a
mature set of telecommunications processes.
Even
if Starke is exaggerating the benefits by a factor of
five or six, the economic logic of moving towards a more
mobile, geographically flexible workforce is still
compelling. The United States is
on the verge of a workplace revolution -- and Virginia
has front-row seats. State policy makers don't understand it
yet, but they face a critical a choice: Continue the
unsustainable tax-and-build transportation strategy of
the past half century, or employ public resources to
accelerate the shift to the workplace model of the
future.
In
Starke’s appraisal the main barrier to effective
telecommuting has been the difficulty in projecting
video. The small, jerky and fuzzy images supported by
low bandwidth Internet connections do not offer a viable
alternative to face-to-face communications. “If the
image is flaky,” he says, “it doesn’t get used.”
Now
that computers are faster and broadband more available,
however, the missing link has clicked into place. Video
now can supplement voice
communication with the subtle cues of body
language. “With high bandwidth,” says Starke, “you can
have pretty subtle discussions. [The video picture]
tells you whether the person is awake, whether they’re
engaged, whether they’re interested.”
Starke
estimates that it costs about $3,000 initially and about
$1,000 annually to set up a PC, video camera, robust Internet
connection and software to support a home office.
AgilQuest
provides another key piece of the workplace revolution. Vivadelli, a former
IBM
employee who pioneered an in-house version of his
technology for the computer giant, has developed
software that enables companies to downsize their office
space requirements by shifting employees from dedicated
offices to shared offices. The AgilQuest product is way
beyond the concept stage – blue chip clients from
Hewlett-Packard to DeLoitte & Touche are already
using the Network of Space to save millions
of
dollars a year.
The
typical office, says Vivadelli, is 30 percent to 50
percent empty at any given moment – so many people are
out on sales calls, service calls, corporate travel or
vacation that they spend only a fraction of their
time in their offices. Nationally, he guesstimates, the
American economy is wasting $300 billion to $400 billion
annually in excess commercial real estate. “Literally trillions
of dollars of assets are sitting there underutilized.”
AgilQuest
software allows companies to shift to a “hotelling”
arrangement in which employees utilize office space when
they need it. Vivadelli's software allows people to book space
in any corporate facility, quickly transfer their office
phone number to that location and even reserve nearby
meeting rooms. As long as e-mail and other documents
reside on the corporate network, the only thing people
miss is the family portrait on the desk!
It’s
a small step from downsizing an office facility through
hoteling to distributing office space around a
metropolitan area and
moving quarters closer to where employees work or
interact with their customers. Vivadelli’s technology provides
unprecedented flexibility: People can work near
home, clients or their co-workers as the demands of
business productivity dictate.
Starke
and Vivadelli cite two other benefits to the Network of
Space. Telecommunications technology is already being
used to out-source business functions overseas – why
not use it to integrate Virginia’s
job-scarce rural economy with the state’s more dynamic
metropolitan areas? If the tools exist for
Northern
Virginians
to
work effectively with Indians on the other side of the
world, they exist also to work
effectively with Southside Virginians who reside within
a half day's driving distance when face-to-face meetings
are called for.
Finally,
9/11 has demonstrated the vulnerability of highly
concentrated business operations. The imperative of
business continuity suggests that government and
businesses – especially those near high-profile
terrorist targets like New
York
and
Washington, D.C.
–
should decentralize their offices and adopt the
capability to reconfigure their workforces at home or in
satellite offices should disaster strike.
The
major barrier to radical change is workplace culture.
Many executives believe they can’t manage employees
they can’t physically see. There's still a lot to
learn, Starke concedes. “You have to increase the
maturity, sophistication of your processes. You have to
have performance measures, communications processes,
collaboration tools.”
But attitudes are changing
as the pioneers show how telework can be managed.
Until
those attitudes change,
the Telework Consortium, AgilQuest and their allies will continue making the
business case for telework, conducting research studies,
lobbying for broadband deployment, sponsoring pilot
projects and disseminating best business practices.
Until the big guys get it, Starke says, small
businesses, many of which are virtual organizations to
begin with, are likely to lead the way. Given its
stake in improving transportation mobility -- not to
mention its status as the largest employer in Virginia,
with employees scattered all over the state -- the
Commonwealth needs to climb on board.
--
July
12, 2004
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