A little more than ten years ago, we were working with a large Fortune 100 mainland company and trying to extol the virtues of technology and how it was going to change the way we live and work. Being a Fortune 100 company, they had the resources to produce a slick video showing people bicycling to "neighborhood telecommuting centers" where they would log on to computers and go about their days work. Cell phones, much smaller than their counterparts of the period (but much larger than most today) were widely used. Video conferences were highlighted, not just for business purposes, but for Grandma and Grandpa "back east" to talk with their grandchildren. Automobile traffic was virtually non-existent, and there was no pollution on the bikeway.
This was 1994. The video was set in 2005. After every showing, the CIO of the mainland company would start out with "we've been told to edit this video, we need to move the date up about 5 years."
Well, it's now 2005, and there isn't a city in America that resembles anything like the utopia of that video, certainly not our Honolulu. What happened?
Telecommuting is not dead. In fact, it's more popular than ever. The proliferation of high-speed Internet access, in conjunction with corporate Virtual Private Networks (VPN) has eliminated the need for neighborhood telework centers. Just about any organization can (relatively) easily provide access to the corporate network, including email, documents, and even resources such as color laser printers and fax machines. (Why anyone uses a fax machine nowadays is beyond me, but that's a topic for another column.)
Cell phones allow you to make calls from virtually anywhere. Practically all cell phone plans include long-distance for "free," allowing you to call anywhere in the country for the same cost as a local call, say to Kakaako. As voice-over-Internet improves, it too will facilitate telecommuting.
Several Hawaii companies have taken advantage of these technologies to eliminate their need for a physical office. For example, John Weldon, President of local management consulting firm Business Solution Technologies, Inc., says "the need for a physical office nowadays is virtually nil for an organization like ours. We're almost always out at client sites. All of our employees have cell phones, and between that and email, we can communicate with each other pretty efficiently." When necessary, conference calls are set up using standard telephone company services. BST servers are housed by a local ISP and accessed via secure VPN. Weldon goes on to say "BST initially started out subletting space from a CPA firm, but I knew we weren't using it efficiently because the receptionist didn't recognize half of our people!"
Other companies that require their staff to be at client sites or on the road, like those in sales-related fields, have had similar success with telecommuting. But clearly, they are exceptions to the rule. Why hasn't telecommuting taken off at a greater pace for other types of organizations? Several factors continue to hamper its success. The most important factor is human nature. Only very motivated, conscientious and disciplined individuals can resist the urge to goof off when not closely supervised.
Telecommuting technology hasn't exactly shown its mettle either. The video tele-conference (VTC) was supposed to replace the need for face-to-face meetings. Today, high quality VTC's are still relatively expensive - not just in terms of gear, but also in bandwidth. Unless you are conducting regular VTC's interisland, to the mainland, or other faraway places, it is very difficult to justify the cost of implementing the necessary circuits, especially when you take into account the real and perceived value of a face-to-face meeting. This value cannot be underestimated, especially in communities like Hawaii, where personal relationships are often the most important part of doing business.
Nevertheless, look for telecommuting to become more popular over the next few years, especially as generations of kids who've grown up doing their homework online enter the work force. In the shorter term, especially in Honolulu, if office rent continues to rise, more companies might be willing to offset high rent costs by dealing with some of the shortcomings of telecommuting. The utopia of a traffic-free city, however, is far down the horizon.
