The story of ‘unintended consequences’...

It seemed a nice gesture, a year or so ago, when Ford, Delta Airlines, even the US postal service, along with other high profile companies, began heavily subsidizing, or outright giving away PCs to their employees. On one hand, it was a perk to retain workers in a competitive job market. On another, less altruistic note, these ‘wired workforce’ programs were a way to bring employees into the ‘Knowledge Age’ in a painless, win-win manner. But an ‘unintended consequence’ of these programs is that these companies are getting more productive employees--they have been clamoring to tie their new PCs into their corporations' intranets and e-mail systems so they can keep up on their work on their own time!

According to a Ford spokesperson, "The lines between work and home are blurring with the ability to connect from anywhere. Ford has to recognize that trend and figure out how to deal with it -- not just in the Model E program, but under the auspices of everything we do."

This has strained some companies' dial-in or Virtual Private Network (VPN) facilities--where an employee connects to the public Internet but establishes a secure, encrypted connection through it, to the company's Intranet. But from an employer's perspective, what a good reason to have to expand facilities--to let people work when they otherwise might not!

Of course many of us know that there is a downside to not having to leave work at work. As a telecommuter myself, the temptation to get just a little more work done is often very hard to resist, and a balance does have to be found. (It is easy to say that, but it is rather harder to walk away from the growing pile of articles to read, or e-mails to answer...)

Delta's Tara Werho provides a reasonable perspective on this issue: "The goal is not to get employees to work 24 hours per day. But all people do not work from 8 to 5. Some people want to answer their e-mail in the quiet of their homes and we want to give them the flexibility to do that." 

Works for me! And, clearly, it works for a growing number of people in a wide range of jobs. It is just one more example of how the Internet and Convergence are changing the way we work, live and play.

Jeffrey Harrow


Senior Consulting Engineer (Technology and Corporate Development Group), Compaq

Note: This is an article from the `Rapidly Changing Face of

Computing', a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey

Harrow. More discussions around the innovations and trends of contemporary

computing and the technologies that drive them are available at www.compaq.com/rcfoc.

The writer's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Compaq. The

RCFoC is copyright 2000, Compaq.