Once upon a time, "telecommuter" was easy to define: it was anyone who wasn't working where everyone else was, but who still needed all that network access. In general, the setup was simple—provide e-mail and a VPN—and it was also centralized. IT issued you a laptop. IT set up your VPN access. If your company was all bleeding edge and had a BlackBerry Server, IT issued you a BlackBerry. The VPN software slowed all but the fastest pipes to a crawl, which was okay, because 99 percent of your work under that setup was e-mailing Microsoft Office documents around the office. Even a BlackBerry could handle that.
No one really liked this approach, but users didn't want to suggest using their own stuff instead. Setting up e-mail on non-BlackBerrys was a tedious procedure, and no phone browser could even begin to handle webmail at a level anyone would want to use, even if the screens could have handled it. And IT departments hated these kinds of requests. Really. I've been doing telecommuting setups in various ways since the early/mid '90s. It sucked for IT as much as—if not more than—it did for the users.
The result was a centralized, highly regulated, overcontrolled mess that everyone wanted to work, but there was no real impetus to make it happen on any level other than "gosh, wouldn't it be great if we could..."
Flash forward to 2011. What if you had told me, in 1995 or so, that in 16 years, I'd have the telecommuting setup I have now? With IT not controlling devices, with self-service for devices setup, where our primary usage guidelines were "don't be stupid, and if you even think you've lost your phone, let IT know immediately so we can wipe the data on it"? I'd have laughed in your face. Not because I would have hated the idea, but because it was too fanciful. It would be like talking about an iPad to Da Vinci.
The shift
There's a temptation to point at the iPhone and say, "That's why." This is partially true, in that the popularity of the iPhone has been a motivating force, but other things happened, too—in particular better bandwidth and supporting infrastructure.
From an IT point of view, the biggest change was bandwidth. In the last 20 years, high-speed bandwidth at home has gone from something only rich geeks had to something only people living way out in the boonies can't get. Everyone who might want to telecommute has DSL/cable modems now, and if you live in the right places, even faster connections. In the US, recent figures talk about broadband penetration of around 65 percent. That's still too low, but compared to when I first started dealing with telecommuting, it's astoundingly high. High speed access, including WiFi and cellular connections, is critical to telecommuting because it makes actually doing work bearable.
Once companies could assume that everyone had decent bandwidth at home, users no longer needed to care about special (and routinely horrible) low-bandwidth websites and about how large a file was. Broadband allowed companies to jettison the modem pools and the banks of analog phone lines. (That's right, kids. At the dawn of time, to allow telecommuting, every company pretty much had to be their own miniature dial-up provider. It wasn't cheap.) The removal of many zeros from the cost of telecommuting support removed much of the corporate resistance to the idea.
Then all of a sudden, there was this...explosion of infrastructure. HTML made posting information dead easy. Blogging software/content management systems made using HTML for that purpose even easier, and allowed the conversation to become bidirectional. E-mail went from a "you must have experts and servers and stuff" to "Gmail." Calendaring moved from the realm of things like Exchange and Notes to something as simple as e-mail. The idea that you don't have to have everything inside the company network pushed not just e-mail and calendaring, but all kinds of business-critical services, outside the company firewall. It seems weird to think of Salesforce.com as 'earth-shattering' but really, it was. And a wholesale commoditization of IT, not just in terms of computers and phones and such, but across the entire realm of IT, happened.
Telecommuting as a separate thing is pretty much dead. You get e-mail on your phone, you write documents on your iPad, you run videoconferences on your laptop, and you do that anywhere you happen to be. When people conduct FaceTime chats on airplanes over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the idea that there's this special "telecommuting" thing you have, and that you need special gear to do it, is dead, dead, dead. Everyone is "telecommuting."
This is the issue for most companies and IT departments: not if they will allow telecommuting/remote working, but how they will manage it. How do you deal with every employee wanting to BYOD, (Bring Your Own Device), expecting that they can get to the resources they need from home, in a hotel, or on an airplane? When everyone working for you has a smartphone, how do you justify making them carry two? When everyone buys a personal tablet, how do you say, "No! You may not use that for work!" (More importantly, why would you say that?)
While there are some companies and IT departments in the "WE MUST CONTROL EVERYTHING" mode, the truth is, most companies have realized that judicious use of BYOD, Cloud, etc., not only makes for happier employees but it gives them a lot of flexibility they would not have otherwise. From what I've seen, the trick is not to look for some "perfect product" that does everything, but to create a measured approach that's right for your needs.
None of this is to say that the shift beyond corporate boundaries comes without problems. It does—and security is chief among them.
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