Telecommuting - Technology

Technology

The roots of telecommuting are found in early 1970s technology that linked satellite offices to downtown mainframes by dumb terminals using telephone lines as a network bridge. The ongoing exponential decreases in cost and increases in performance and usability of personal computers forged the way to decentralize even further, moving the office to the home. By the early 1980s, branch offices and home workers were able to connect to organizational mainframes using personal computers and terminal emulation.

Telework is facilitated by tools such as groupware, virtual private networks, conference calling, videoconferencing, and Voice over IP (VOIP). It can be efficient and useful for companies as it allows staff and workers to communicate over long distances, saving significant amounts of travel time and cost. As broadband Internet connections become more commonplace, more and more workers have adequate bandwidth at home to use these tools to link their home office to their corporate intranet and internal phone networks.

The adoption of local area networks promoted sharing of resources, and client–server computing allowed for even greater decentralization. Today, telecommuters can carry laptop PCs which they can use both at the office and at home (and almost anywhere else). The rise of cloud computing technology and Wi-Fi availability have enabled access to remote servers via a combination of portable hardware and software.

Furthermore, with their improving technology and increasing popularity, smartphones are becoming widely used in telework. They substantially increase the mobility of the worker and the degree of coordination with the organization. The technology of mobile phones and personal digital assistant (PDA) devices allows instant communication of text messages, camera photos and video clips from anywhere and at anytime.