About 250,000 Australians have replaced commuting with telecommunications, and the number is expected to swell to two million by 2005.
This is a finding by Goanna Communications is a report published last week.
On its face, it means a lot of profit for computer and phone companies. However, it is more complex than that, according to John McNaull, technical director of Gonna.
“”The benefits will not happen automatically,” he said.
Most of the factors affecting the growth of telecommunting were under the control of policy makers in business and government and needed a co-ordinated development plan.
Technology alone was not enough to get the environmental, cost and other benefits. Retraining and new thinking by managers were required. Changed transport and environment policies were also needed.
McNaull pointed to a major market for IT vendors, especially intelligent networks, video-conferencing and workgroup software.
Goanna knows the value of the market and knowledge of it because the report is priced at $950. Phone 02 5557377.
Of course, the telecommuting market has far wider implications than more loot for the phone and computer companies, if indeed, that will happen. Every home sale will result in one less business sale.
The market for office space might contract, especially as business wake up to the fact that electronic storage is cheaper than paper storage. Public transport might lose some of the peak off the peak hours as office workers visit home base more irregularly.
The home improvement market might expand as people build extra rooms, another entrance, and install officer furniture.
The psychiatry industry might flourish as people go crackers without human conduct. And so on.
Goanna’s report identified some big-ticket benefits. The telecommuting market has growth rates of 12 per cent. There is scope for more than $1 billion a year in productivity gains for Australian employers. About $500 million a year in saved from traffic congestion, accidents and noise. Reduced air pollution and reduced greenhouse gas emissions will save more money and increase the quality of life.
Are these amounts fanciful? Well, they come to $750 for each of the two million telecommuters. It is about $4 a day each. Perhaps the amounts under estimate the traffic savings. The productivity savings are perhaps harder to measure.
Certainly government makes it hard for large employers: occupational health and safety committees, union consultation, fifth and sixth chances for employees who are hopeless and so on. With telecommuting employers will contract for product. They will measure work by more reliable means that just clocking the bundy and “”being there”.
There is an overall efficiency of using the presently vast unused resource of suburbia in the day. Empty buildings. Unused infrastructure and so on.
Central offices can be smaller, use less power, have fewer dunnies and so on. But for it to happen companies and governments will have to be more flexible and imaginative (suppressed tittering and scoffing).
Telecommuters can have more flexibility. For example, I am writing this at 11pm on Thursday night after a tough night of competition squash. But I am looking forward to a longish lunch tomorrow. Those with children can juggle more easily, and so on.
It is made possible with telecommunciations: modems, computer links, mobile phones, phone diversions etc etc.
But it also requires changes to thought patterns. And this is more difficult. Scientists and engineers are always looking at what is possible and how to move forward. Clerks, lawyers, politicians accountants and company directors are more hesitant.
There is one thing that terrifies me, though. Other people might discover telecommuting. They might also discover the extraordinary efficiencies of modern computer programs, faxes and telephone systems. Then I will lose my competitive edge and will have to work harder to keep up.
While some of my colleagues labour with a 10-year-old mainframe and have to travel to the industrial slumland of Fyshwick for the privilege of using it and have to labour through wads of paper files in the library, I cut about five or six hours a week off my work with technology. But if they find out, that will be the end of my long lunch.
That is why the Goanna research is dangerous subversion.
Do not believe of a word of it. Struggle in the smog to your offices. Chain yourselves to the work practices of the 1950s and let me keep the competitive edge.
Come to think of it, you can safely rely on most large companies and governments to do the dumb thing, so I have no cause for alarm.