Framework for the assessment of feasibility of telecommuting in Australian organisations

This paper proposes a systematic approach that will help managers evaluate the suitabilitv of alternative telecommuting configurations. In particular, the main task of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework and a decision support system (DSS) for telecommuting managers to assess the tradeogs involved in introducing telecommuting in their organisations. The proposed DSS is in the form of an interactive system facilitating the evaluation and assessment of the effectiveness of promising telecommuting configurations before they are actually implemented. The system is designed to contain economic cost43enefit models, statistical models, heuristics, and simulations of “what-if’ scenarios. The system is being developed from the results of existing studies of telecommuting eflectiveness, and is in the process of being calibrated and extended with the results offurther telecommuting studies. 1. Telecommuting in the Australian context: introduction and background The concept of widespread telecommuting in a community envisages the presence of large numbers of employees who, instead of commuting to work, perform either all or a sign&ant fraction of their tasks at home. In recent years, advances in telecommunications such as computer networking electronic mail, remote database access, mobile data link, and facsimile transmissions have made communication over both short and long distances increasingly easy, fast and cheap. In Australia, businesses and industries have not yet fully explored the potential benefits of telecommuting. In view of the fact that the technology permitting widespread telecommuting is already available in Australia, and that traditional commuting distances are relatively long, a natural question arises: Why are Australian companies not taking advantage of it? One of the problems is that of “technology transfer”. That is, managers are faced with a complex task of choosing an appropriate telecommuting configuration (including identifjing suitable telecommuters & appropriate fraction of time spent away from the office, assignment of tasks, sofhvareJhardware ) and with introducing and accepting a new way of doing business. Australia is a huge, sparsely populated country with an area of 7,682,300 sq km and population of 17, 2 11,000. However, nearly 60% of its population is concentrated in the large coastal cities of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth (1990 census figures). In addition, because of the economic conditions in the rural areas there is a trend for people to move from the interior to the cities on the coast, frequently in search of better employment opportunities. In the case of Tasmania, people migrate to the mainland for the same reasons. This trend is placing greater stress on the urban environments, contributing to trafhc congestion and the accompanying pollution problems in the major cities and accelerating the suburban sprawl. The latter, in turn, leads to further dependence on the automobile as the basic means of transportation, longer commuting times and greater costs related to transportation, both for government and individuals [lo, 11,4]. While traditionally the Australian economy has been dominated by mining, agriculture and wool production, these industries, as well as mantiacturing are becoming increasingly less labour intensive to the point where some recent estimates suggest that more than 60% of the Australian workforce could be included under the tertiary or service sectors of the economy. In 1987, some 4060% of the workforce was in the Information Sector [ 171. In addition, the Australian workhorce is generally well educated and there is high degree of acceptance in the society of computers, facsimile machines, cellular telephones and other sophisticated office equipment. The above factors, when combined with high unemployment rates (especially in rural areas) and the large distances separating Australian commu.nities, may 1060-3425/95 $4.00