If you work in the knowledge economy, especially in a technical field, odds are you know one or more people who telework.  The trend toward telework has become a wave in this decade. What are the drivers toward telework? Lower costs and better lifestyles are reasons cited by people I talk with about why they prefer to work remotely rather than trek to an office everyday. Environmentalists are getting into the picture, too. On CNet, a recent post talks about the green benefits of telework. 

Whatever you think about the causes for telework, it seems the trend is here to stay. I see it as a natural evolution of the workplace. In the late 19th century to mid-20th century, the industrial economy pushed tens of millions of people into factories. In the latter half of the 20th century, the rise of the knowledge economy pushed millions more into offices. In the early 21st century, we are witnessing the rise of the connected economy and a shift in the traditional office model. At forward-thinking companies like IBM, there is a lower emphasis on physical presence and a greater emphasis on productive work output.

Personally, I am a big fan of telework. I see no reason for the employees of a company to congregate in offices everyday. Most of the arguments I hear in favor of office work have to do with communications and management. Communications issues can be solved with technology, and we will continue to see business communications evolve to meet the demands of telework. Management issues need to be addressed with better management practices. I have always thought that making everyone come to an office for a certain number of hours per day is a poor subsititute for actually monitoring and measuring their productive work output.

Furthermore, the digital economy is a different animal than the industrial and knowledge economies. In this economy, we increasingly deal with bits rather than physical things. There is no machine press to operate, no paper document to send to a colleague. I can just as easily share bits with someone halfway around the world as in the next cubicle. So why should we limit the physical presence of employees, and therefore our potential talent pool, to a small geographical area? There are good reasons in certain situations (mentoring junior employees comes to mind), but those reasons a finite.

Noting all this, I would like to announce that Emergent Path is hiring for two positions, a Senior Consultant and a Junior Developer. Both position are telework positions. The Senior Consultant position is available to anyone in a major metropolitan area of the United States.  The Junior Developer position is open only to someone local to San Diego, but it is a telework position. If you are interested in learning more or know someone who would be a good fit for us, please direct inquiries to careers@emergentpath.com.

Apple just released a big patch bundle for OSX, 88 patches in all, 105 MB You can read about the full details in an article on the Register   I wonder if the "big bang" patch release system set up by Apple is related to the release cycles of open source projects like Apache, OpenSSH, and ClamAV? 

 I like the idea of releasing fewer patches with more frequency, but I don't know if Apple has that luxury. Ubuntu has a six month release cycle, and I see some packages missing a release on occasion if their project teams are not on the same schedule. I wonder if it would be possible to get major open source vendors on a common release schedule? Maybe they try, I am going to ask someone from an Ubuntu team and see what they say. If you know the answer, drop me a comment, I would love to know.

One thing I know for sure is that Ubuntu is big, REALLY big, 17015 packages and counting at the moment. Even if only ten percent of those packages are being actively worked, that represents an enormous logistical challenge to get all the project team to hit specific targets. Ubuntu contributors are using collaboration software, especially emergent systems like wikis and blogs, which are great for software projects. I'd love to see someone attempt to build metrics around the use of these collaborative tools in the development of Ubuntu, because it is such a big open source project and it provides both transparency to make it easy to study and enough size to provide both a really good sample of data and scaling evidence from projects large and small. 

I recently flipped through a book that a friend of mine was reading, Jame Scott's "Domination and the Arts of Resistance". a fairly scholarly book, but one with a thesis that has some relevance to the trend toward seeing Enterprise 2.0 as a game-changer for the corporate world. I wanted to share some thoughts that I drew from an admittedly limited reading of parts of his book and how it applies to the current Enterprise 2.0 discussion.

I had just read a post by Don Tapscott, about Wikinomics and Enterprise 2.0. Tapscott cites the four principles of Wikinomics-Peering,Being Open, Sharing, and Acting Globally - as the potential dirving principles of a new way of thinking about organizing commercial activities.Yet Tapscott notes that people with vested interests are bound to fight these sorts of changes to corporate power structures. After I leafed through Scott's book, I began to put together the connections that had been bubbling in the backof mymind since really being introduced to the Enterprise 2.0 concept at the FASTForward conference in January.

As of yet, I don't really have any answers, I just have questions thatI think are worthy of serious consideration.

Do employees in a corporation see the rules imposed by the senior management of the corporation as inevitable and impossible to overcome? That is, do employees see themselves as "us", and management as "them", with no serious chance of moving from one group to the other? Certainly in traditional heavy industries like coal mining, steel and auto manufacturing, employees have long held this view. The domination of management led to appalling conditions in some industries, a situation that led to the worldwide growth of organized labor. Newer industries like electronics and services have in many ways escaped the problems of that earlier era, but as anyone who has worked in an office knows, power relationships are very much a part of the modern corporate world. Dilbert,for instance, may be a comic strip, but it resonates with people because of the parallels they see with their own lives.

Does this environment create a situation where employees see no opportunity for their circumstances to change, and therefore accommodate themselves to the situation by forcing the ideas of corporate power structures to the back of their minds? Do they create, as Scott calls it,a false consciousness about their environment so they can live their lives in relative peace? 

Will corporations want to embrace Enterprise 2.0? Will corporate boards, and more importantly corporate executives, see enough advantage in the gains that Enterprise 2.0 promises, or be threatened enough by the doom and gloom predictions for companies that fail to embrace Enterprise 2.0, to open channels of communication, flatten hierarchies, and share information in ways that they do not today?

Furthermore, if Enterprise 2.0 begins to bring measurable advantages to companies that embrace it, will that motivate the followers to make more than superficial changes in their corporate power structures? Will companies introduce some tools and technologies, but fail to follow through with the deeper cultural changes required to reap the rewards of Enterprise 2.0? If companies fail to follow through, will employees accept the limits on their empowerment, or will the situation create resentment and foster conflicts between employees and management? If the idea of Enterprise 2.0 is to foster collboration, will incomplete adoption of Enterprise 2.0 foster balkanization instead?

Executives at big companies are typically "A" players who have made their way to the top through hard work, good judgement, and dedication. After having worked during their professional careers in an environment that encourages individual competitiveness, will these "A" players be able to adapt to a more open environment that will enable people at the bottom of the hierarchy to become overnight stars?