JALA Thoughts

One of the often mentioned downsides of telecommuting from home is the lack of face-to-face contact with coworkers. No more conversations around the water cooler. This can be particularly true for full-time home-based telecommuters. In one of our telecommuting demonstration projects we even had a telecommuter who quit the program so he could go back to the office full-time—and he was telecommuting only one day per week!

This risk of anomie is often quoted as a reason not to telecommute even though it is rare among part-time telecommuters. But now technology is coming to the rescue with robotic telepresence. A company named Willow Garage is developing a telepresence robot called the Texas Robot in order to help them understand the technical challenges and social benefits of robot telepresence.
Continue reading Lonely telecommuters? Help is on the way

Six months ago I blogged about the possible consequences of widespread uses of information technology in fighting totalitarianism. The focus of the blog was on the use of the Internet by Iranian dissidents against the current regime in Iran. In an article (The Iranian Exile’s Eye by Nazila Fathi) in the January 17, 2010 edition of the New York Times comes another fascinating example of technological ingenuity. The author of the article, an exiled Iranian reporter, describes a key method of evading repressive authorities: bluetooth. Specifically,

one of the demonstrators’ most useful tools was the Bluetooth short-range radio signal that Americans use mainly to link a cellphone to an earpiece, or a printer to a laptop. Long ago, Iranian dissidents discovered that Bluetooth can as easily link cellphones to each other in a crowd.

And that made “Bluetooth” a verb in Iran: a way to turn citizen reportage instantly viral. A protester Bluetooths a video clip to others nearby, and they do the same. Suddenly, if the authorities want to keep the image from escaping the scene, they must confiscate hundreds or thousands of phones and cameras.

Flash back four decades to a meeting I had with a scientist from a country just east of the iron curtain. Continue reading Telework and totalitarianism, Part 2

Like telework in general, telemedicine has a long, if obscure, history. The idea behind telemedicine is that information technology might be able effectively to facilitate the delivery of medical services without the collocation of patient and physician. Clearly, there are some apparent limits to the variety of such services. The doctor is in one location, the patient somewhere entirely else. I can easily imagine a tele-visit to the doctor’s office where, via color TV, the doctor has me stick out my tongue, takes a blood pressure reading, possibly with the aid of a local assistant, and prescribes some pills. That’s basically the state of the art in the mid 1970s. Let’s call that telemedicine 0.9.

The significant distinction between “ordinary” telework and telemedicine is the location independence issue. Many forms of information work are relatively insensitive to the locations of the participants. I can write a report anywhere and still get it delivered to its intended recipients anywhere else. But medical interactions? I used to joke that brain surgery was not a good candidate for telework; a certain intimacy between the surgeon’s hands and the patient’s skull seemed to be in order.

But, like almost everything else, the times they are a-changin’. Technology marches on and it alters the perspective for telemedicine. Let’s glance at telemedicine 2.0

Continue reading Telemedicine 2.0

To all of you who have actually gone out into the crowds in search of holiday bargains here’s a thought: your exposure to a carrier of Swine Flu has probably at least doubled. The chances that you’re able to be vaccinated against SF, in case you haven’t already received the shot, are less than planned by the government, because of production delays. Also there are shortages of  Tamiflu, according to the media. Furthermore, we are closing in on what is normally the peak season for flu, at least in the northern hemisphere. Also, SF appears to prefer young children and working age folks rather than the elderly. The clear implication of these factoids?

Swine flu may be a growing possibility in your working household. What to do?

Continue reading It’s that time again

An article in the 28 October 2009 Washington Post raised the specter of a massive breakdown of communications in the DC region as a result of the flu pandemic. The cause of this potential cataclysm? Telecommuters!

Yes, the putative culprits are telecommuters working from home either because they or their kids have the flu or because they want to otherwise isolate themselves from flu carriers in the office. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) states that large numbers of such telecommuters could cause confusion and network disruption, according to the article. But, not to worry because we are prepared, right? Well…

Continue reading Excess Success?

I am often asked why I make claims about the ability of telework to improve teleworkers’ effectiveness; whether there is some sort of magic that makes telework special. Well, telework may be special in its ability to increase effectiveness but it’s not magic. Here’s part of the secret formula.

QUIET!

That’s it. A substantial portion of the documented improvement in the effectiveness of teleworkers derives from the fact that they are interrupted less often than their in-office colleagues. The get more time to think about what they’re doing. Now there is an article in the October 2009 issue of IEEE Spectrum that quantifies the impacts of interruptions on effectiveness. Here’s an example from the article Infoglut by Nathan Zeldes:

Field research by Gloria Mark and her colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, shows that information workers are interrupted, on average, every three minutes. Even if it only takes the brain a minute to get back in gear that’s a lot of wasted time.

“Interruptions” in this research included phone calls; incoming emails; colleagues socializing; Internet surfing; texting and similar deviations from the business at hand.

Routinely during our training sessions for teleworkers I would ask them how often they were interrupted when they were working in the office. Most answers were less than ten minute intervals. Mark’s research suggests that those interruptions were more frequent than the answers I’ve received. Next I would say, “Suppose that you have just thought of the breakthrough idea that would revolutionize your company’s business and you were interrupted; how soon could you recover that flash of inspiration after the interruption was over?” Often the answer was: “Never”.

Here’s the rest of that secret: Properly trained teleworkers experience significantly fewer interruptions than do their colleagues back in the office. Let’s do the numbers.

Continue reading Quiet! The secret of telework success

On 21 September 2009 Netflix announced the winners of a contest to develop a better algorithm for recommendations on the films  it distributes. The winners share one million dollars. As Good Morning Silicon Valley (GMSV) put it:

For a relative pittance, the movie rental company got thousands of experts around the world to bust their butts on its challenge before a coalition of leading teams calling itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos edged another collaboration called The Ensemble in a furious finish that literally came down to the final minutes of the three-year contest and had to be settled by a tiebreaker rule.

And who were these puissant winners? A virtual team. Again from GMSV:

The seven-member, multinational winning team was pleased to be given the chore of divvying up a million bucks and also for the chance to finally meet each other in person at the award ceremony.

Once again the world has been shown that virtual teams are not only possible but that they can beat out “traditional” teams that work in the old fashioned way, face-to-face. But wait! The almost-first-place team was also virtual. They lost by a fraction of an eyelash, according to Netflix. What are the implications of this for your organization? In this economy?

Continue reading Working together apart

On August 18th, 2009, the New York Times published an editorial that pretty much sums up the current state of affairs: Congress appears to be impervious to the usual scientific statements about global warming but just might listen to an argument that focuses on national security. The trigger in this case is a report published in 2007(!) by “the CNA Corporation, a Pentagon-funded think tank”. CNA warned that, as global warming increases so, too, will the threat of climate-induced political tensions, mass migrations, local and regional conflicts, and so on. All of these changes can negatively affect our security as well as that of other nations.

Having spent almost two decades in one phase or another of national security pursuits I can attest to the superior ability of defense issues to get the attention of Congress. This was particularly the case for issues that might take decades to unfold, as is now the case with measures to avoid the global warming tipping point. Having later spent a few decades in non-defense research I can also attest to the feeling that it is much harder to get a million dollars for non-defense research than it is to get the same amount for defense research.

So, unfortunately, the Times editorial has a cogent point.

Continue reading When all else fails try war

Workers in most developed countries can be excused for being baffled by the hue and cry in the US Congress concerning health care. Most of these countries have affordable health care built into their economic systems. Their response is likely: “What’s the big deal?”

Here’s the big deal, of particular importance as Congress heads home for its summer break—without passing a health care bill.

Continue reading The health care hurdle

It seems like yesterday that we watched the first men to actually walk on the moon. When I was a freshman in Lawrence College (now University), an avid science fiction fan, the woman sitting next to me in Physics 101 asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated. My answer was: “Put man on the moon!” Thus continued the steps I took to become a “rocket scientist” (at age 15 I was the youngest member of the American Rocket Society). Although my post-BA career mostly wound through the military space program I was able to help NASA decide on the cameras to use for surveying the Moon in order to pick suitable landing sites.

And now it’s 40 years later. In the words of Walter Cronkite on the grand occasion of the first landing; “Whew!” What a magnificent sight! Yet much has happened—and failed to happen—since that day.

Continue reading Wow! 40 years! An autobiographical note