A good friend, teacher, grad student, and former hi-tech consultant, recently blogged about and eWeek article which noted that many executives think telecommuting is a limiter to career growth. I posted a reply over on Libby’s blog but also thought it deserved a bit more thought. I will try to describe my experience with telecommuting for a large technology company.

Businesses call it “Collaboration Software” whereas the rest of the world calls it by whatever program they are using - “chatrooms” “forums”, “bulletin boards”, etc. This is definitely true of persistent chat solutions. The idea has been around longer than text messaging. The concept has roots in AOL chat rooms, message boards, BBS’s, even list-servers.
The [...]

I have really settled into my home office more than I have in a long time. Years ago, long before telecommuting was even mentioned in the employee benefits of most companies, I had the opportunity to work from home about 80% for a whole summer. Some might argue that working from home in the summer [...]

A good friend, Libby, wrote in her blog …
This always-on attitude that pervades the workplace (not just mine, but many) requires that we, as the workers (both teachers and those in other fields) to decide what our lives will be like and when we will work, then set our boundaries, and then stick to [...]

I envision a conferencing service that is as easy as a cellphone. Imagine a service with the equivalent of voice dialing …
“Get Rocky, Carl, and Libby”

The service locates the participants, but discovers Libby is busy. It scans forward and backward in time to find Libby is available 30 minutes ago, but only for a few minutes, [...]

The timing could not have been more perfect …
Conventional approaches to flexibility, such as flextime, don’t help time-zone warriors very much … Instead, they need ways to regain control over their time. … being explicit about personal commitments when they intervene, says Tess Mateo, Wyckoff, N.J., a director in the CEO’s office at PricewaterhouseCoopers. [...]

If you work from a home office - i.e. single employee, family business, independent consultant, small Internet business, farmer, new entrepreneur, etc. - you don’t have a big corporate IT department to support you. You *are* the IT department !
With today’s business, “data” has a value that belies it’s invisibility and the tiny physical space it occupies. [...]