I have commented in the past about the ability of telework to mitigate the effects of disasters but hurricane Sandy gives a new twist to the issues. Most of the disasters that occur in places like California tend to be of the earthquake variety. The central effect of earthquakes is that ruptures in land surface break roads, bridges, and highways, with the disruptions lasting sometimes for months or even years at a time. Yet the information infrastructure—the telephone network, Internet and electrical power networks—tends to survive the earthquake or is quickly repairable. In these cases organizations that telework can continue operations with no or few interruptions. This is generally the case in non-earthquake related disasters as well, including blizzards, floods and fires where the roads may be blocked but the information infrastructure is intact.
However, in the case of disasters like major hurricanes and floods the situation can get a little more complicated. Continue reading Telework, disasters, and how to overcome them →
One of the fears often voiced by prospective telemanagers is the possibility that a telecommuter will, inadvertently or otherwise, leak critical confidential company information to non-company listeners. While research over the years has shown that disgruntled employees working inside the office are the most likely perpetrators of such mischief, the fears still exist. Data loss is always a concern of management, particularly IT managers. A concern that grows when the keeper of the data is somewhere else than the main office.
But sometimes the tables are turned, as in the case of the rescue of Toy Story 2.
Continue reading Telecommuter saves Toy Story 2! →
Much of futures research focuses on identifying trends of one sort or another and defining the key events that might alter the course of the trends. For example, much of my work in forecasting trends in telework deals with defining and quantifying the major factors that influence the growth (or decline) in its acceptance. For the most part forecasting such trends involves estimating (guessing) the parameters in logistic curves. Logistic curves are seen in most growth forecasts such as this one for teleworkers around the world. Often, as in forecasts of the future of microchip performance following Moore’s Law, the growth can be seen as a series of logistic curves, each of which grows to a peak then declines in use. Of course the day-to-day details of growth and decline are much noisier than those smooth curves. The primary factors in such curves are the growth rate, the peak value and the subsequent decline rate. Are you still awake?
The preceding covers the business as usual part of forecasting. As Gordon Moore discovered it’s a fairly straightforward job to estimate technological trends. Also, such trends make it fairly easy to plan for the respective future events. The task can become much more difficult when we inject human actions or those of what we call nature into the mix. Then we can have severe examples of discontinuities. Take some recent history.
Continue reading Big bangs: the futurist’s dilemma →
. . . about telework, energy and the environment
