One of the earliest discussion threads on the NewWOW site was sparked by a news item (in the San Jose Mercury News, June 2006) about Hewlett Packard cutting back on telecommuting. All IT employees were going to be required to move back to an office environment or be forced to quit.
Excerpts from the conversation:
The original poster: What do you think? Is the HP decision a harbinger of things to come? Or will it backfire on the company and cause it to lose key talent?
From an informed source: The new head of HP IT has a mandate of completely revamping HP's IT infrastructure. He has decided he needs to centralize IT, and will be consolidating 85 data centers into three. He has decided that he needs to bring the IT people back in, and needs to retrain them and get them back up to speed.
Comment: HP never invested in a FULL portfolio or 'network of places' that included 'community offices.' This fourth leg (complimenting the other three of: working from home, from the road /customer premises and always being welcome at the corporate campus) is essential since satellite offices address the imperative of employees dropping into a location close to home to interact with other colleagues to reinforce the corporate culture, utilize meetings facilities to get together with colleagues from the same organization and use leading virtual collaboration tools.
Comment: I am going to make an assumption here, because I obviously don't know the details of the HP IT decision. But my guess is that the decision has nothing to do with any inquiry into how people go about doing their work (as individuals and groups), any measures of how well work is getting done, or how work groups are managed. Just as a sole focus on working from home short-changes distributed work solutions, a lack of inquiry into how work gets done short-changes decisions about if and when distributed work is appropriate...to both employees and to the economic benefit of the company.
An insider: A number of the bloggers seem to be assuming that this is an HP-wide issue. It applies only to a relatively small group of people. The rest of the company is going in the opposite direction with mobility prevailing and growing.
Comment: …it might mean that whatever wasn't working with HP's IT group may have been due to inadequate development of a framework for projects/tasks within their distributed teams (i.e., contact person, person responsible, project boundaries & timeline, project deliverables, division of responsibilities among the members of the distributed teams, how each member would be evaluated on & rewarded for project completion 7 quality, etc.). It is VERY IMPORTANT for any organizational function to be aligned and "in sync" across all organizational sectors.
In the form of a question, is "physical co-location" necessary to forge alignment & integration of all the necessary elements for effective teams/collaboration, or will equally powerful metaphors become available (e. g., some high-def version of VR)?
Thanks to everyone for the motivating discussion.
For more on this issue, see http://www.newwow.net/members/node/57
