E.T., phone home

ON A TYPICAL day, I spend almost two hours commuting in my car. Such a commute encourages all sorts of bad habits: reading e-mail on my BlackBerry while driving, participating in conference calls, and even worse, actually responding to e-mail on my BlackBerry. Although these bad habits make me somewhat productive during the commute, ultimately I arrive at work just a little more tense than I would like. Unfortunately, even with the option of telecommuting, and even though I'm a CTO who has a home office setup up with all the communications bells and whistles I could want, I still need to go to the office for face-to-face meetings nearly every day, so I endure the commute and curse the traffic snarls -- when I'm not checking e-mail. Even though I am commuting in a traditional sense, I am working remotely in my car office until I get to the real office.

While I may not be able to ease the difficulty of juggling work during my commute in the near future, there are a number of things that I am doing at InfoWorld to promote what Gartner called "place-independent work" in a recent report titled "Ten Converging Forces Will Change Your Workforce." The idea of place-independence is nothing new -- some people refer to it by the old name of telecommuting.

InfoWorld is a relatively small company, but we have employees spread out in about 25 different geographic locations -- more than one-third of those are outside of our headquarters in San Mateo, Calif. Invariably, these remote employees are disadvantaged in terms of the IT service they receive, although the remote employees are some of the most critical to our operation. I wrote about my decision to outsource PC desktop support to Centerbeam (see " Selling Outsourcing " ), and now my dream of offering a cost-effective "place-independent" work environment to InfoWorld's employees is proceeding to other areas -- our phone system. Even something as unsexy as a phone system can become a strategic asset.

In InfoWorld's case, we have one main office, four branch offices, and over twenty home offices. Our headquarters in San Mateo has a run-of-the-mill PBX phone system; the branch offices have independent phone systems; and the home users have business lines from local carriers. Calls between our San Mateo and Boston offices are long distance, even though we work for the same company, and a sales person in Boston can't transfer a call directly to a sales person in San Mateo. Our CEO can't send a mass voice mail out to the entire staff. Our annual maintenance costs on the old PBX system are 400% of the maintenance costs on a new system, we pay long distance for our employees to call each other, and remote employees don't enjoy the same phone capabilities as people in our main office.

Enter a new VOIP (voice over IP) phone system. The new phone system InfoWorld is currently implementing will allow any employee to deal with phone calls via software on their laptops and desktops. When combined with a wireless 802.11b LAN connection, employees can route or receive important phone calls to their desk phones while seated in conference rooms on a different floor. Our CEO's assistant will be able to answer his calls and transfer them into his office from her home as if she was in the main office. Our sales staff will never miss an important call, and our key customers will never get a busy signal or go directly to voice mail. The new phone system gives us unique advantages that go beyond dial tone: a higher level of productivity for our decentralized work force and closer contact with our customers.