Telecommuting Revisited

In my previous post I talked about the benefits of working from home. Just when I was researching on quantifying the benefits, I spotted a recent article by Ted Samson on Infoworld about telecommuting. Interestingly, Ted covers the same points that I mentioned in my post but has given references to some telecommuting experiments and quantified benefits. 

He drives the point from the perspective of sustainable IT. Ted lists out the benefits:

1. Increase employee productivity

2. Save companies money

3. Benefits the environment

4. Incentive for current and prospective employees

I would also include business continuity as another benefit with incidents like WTC attack or  worst snow fall in the UK having tremendous potential to affect the operations.

For productivity, he cites the example of American Express:

American Express teleworkers produce 43 percent more business than employees at the office, according to Colorado Telework Coalition. Productivity increased 31 percent among the 9,000 telecommuters in British Telecom's workforce of 80,000, according to the Telework Foundation.

 When he talks about productivity boost, he does not mention every single employee. It is critical for the company to have right recruitment structure to hire right kind of employees, set expectations and manage them effectively.

He also has provided data from Canadian Telework Association and ITAC The Telework Advisory Group of WorldAtWork around the cost savings by implementing telecommuting.

According to the Telework Advisory Group of WorldatWork, employers can realize an annual per-employee savings of $5,000 through telecommuting.

... AT&T reports savings of $3,000 per office, for approximately $550 million, by eliminating or consolidating office space. Meanwhile, about 25 percent of IBM's 320,000 workers worldwide telecommute, saving Big Blue some $700 million in real estate costs.

He also refers to Sun's telecommute program where Sun employees benefited by saving on fuel, time and wear and tear of car. He also refers to Cisco's Virtual Office package which gives remote workers and in-the-office experience.

What about India?

All said, this works very well in the US and Europe, but how does it apply in India? 

Accenture, IBM, Texas Instruments and Wipro were planning to start telecommuting on a war footing basis. Cisco is also known for encouraging telecommuting and one of the pioneers in the field. 

Let me try some math here. 

Considering an average of Rs. 1500 is spent on travel per month by an average employee (which would probably on the lower end) and with 2500 employees, the collective expense to be at work in a month is Rs. 37.5 lakhs and close to 85000 litres of fuel. Over and above this, there is wear and tear of the vehicle, traffic jams, health issues due to pollution and climatic conditions.

This is just a very basic idea of the savings. Having said, all this, telecommuting is not something that can be implemented overnight. Careful planning along with responsible behavior from employees is very critical is successfully running a telecommuting environment.

Do share the experience, benefits and challenges that you or your company had while implementing telecommuting. 

Working From Home

Let me say ... I love it.

Working from home is not a new concept but in India, probably it is not encouraged. I am not talking about people who are into free lancing. This about those people who work for large enterprises and works along with a team to deliver services.

Now, why I love it?

1. Freedom: It lets me operate the way I want to and the pressure is far less compared to being nailed down to a ergonomic (or not so ergonomic) chair and the manager or team lead breathing down your neck.

2. More productive: Given the freedom and environment that I am most comfortable with, I get more work done than when I am in office. In fact, I log into start work earlier than what I would do when I am in office. Moreover, when I am at home, I somehow feel more responsible towards what needs to be delivered and does not feel that I am stretching myself.

3. No distraction: Working from home is a bliss if you need long hours of concentration. It is next to impossible to get that level of concentration if you are in office where people bump into you and end up in casual conversations that you sometimes cannot escape and ultimately lose time.

4. Other benefits:

• No commute
• No traffic jams ( and no heart attacks)
• Save fuel
• No pollution
• Not stuck with canteen food (especially when Chinese Combo has banana and curd rice)

These were personal benefits. But, for corporates, there are huge benefits by promoting this culture.

1. Save on the infrastructure - Reduce investment in power, desk space, desktops, phones and other company utilities. Instead divert fraction of this investment to setup better servers and connectivity infrastructure (VPN, Bandwidth, 3G etc.)

2. People care - Employees benefit out of less travel (health, time and monitory benefit). The concerns of work-life balance by employees get addressed as they get to be at home and they feel responsible for their own time.

3. Business Continuity - For any incidents like 9/11, this kind of operation model always helps with such attacks never affecting the services because you don't station all you employees at one place. One recent incident was the snow fall in the UK where most of the services were disrupted. But there was one case where Silicon.com ensured business continuity by having people work from home.

Working from home has its own set of challenges which corporates may dig out. I am going to try an give some answers here for those challenges.

1. Collaboration & interacting with a team - While this may be one of the prime concerns, instant messaging (IM), VoIP and collaboration tools like Google Docs are always there as a solution to this. For the conference facilities across geographies, there are virtual platforms like SecondLife that can be tapped to reduce travel.

2. Monitoring the staff - Yes, this is a problem. Working from home culture is not going to start working just like that. Unified Communications Technology can be used to create monitoring mechanisms. Clear roles and responsibilities need to be defined for the employees who form a team and thereby creating accountability.

For people interested, here is a post about tips for working from home.

There are some things I miss when I work from home. The human interaction, all the gossips and office politics :). But then, there is Facebook, Twitter and IM for that (i know, not for human interaction). These not just things for personal use. Its high time business starts using these and avail the benefits.

C'mon, this is age of the internet.

Having said that, I have some work to finish before I go to office tomorrow.

Offshoring to grow 40% - Gartner

Gartner, in one of it's press releases, states that offshoring is going to grow more than 40% in 2008.

Gartner evaluated 30 countries on following parameters:
1. Language
2. Government support
3. Labour pool
4. Infrastructure
5. Educational system
6. Cost
7. Political and economic environment
8. Cultural compatibility
9. Global and legal maturity
10. Data and intellectual property security and privacy

Gartner’s top 30 locations for offshore services, by region, were:

Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and Uruguay
Asia/Pacific: Australia, China, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam
Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA): the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Northern Ireland, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey and Ukraine

Their region specific analysis says:

In Asia/Pacific, although positioned as India’s greatest challenger in terms of its potential scale, China fared poorly for language skills. China, India and Singapore all demonstrated strong government support for the promotion of their country as an offshore services location.

The political and economic environment remains a concern for many companies when moving work to offshore locations; in this area Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam all performed weakly.

My take

Good news !!! atleast for an IT professional like me based in India. :)

Gartner also reports that offshoring is going to grow more than 60%. This will require services companies who can cater to non-english client's requirements. This is tricky and will pose challenge to India. My comment can be challenged because, there is quite a lot of work done by Indian MNCs in Europe.

I am not sure if China or Vietnam is going to be a real challenge to India with the such big English speaking population. Added to this, we have around 2 million engineering graduates getting added to the talent pool. Considering that only 20% is employable in IT, we still have enough talent available.

Having said that, the issues that are going to bite us back are:
1. Infrastructure
2. American economy slump
3. Sticking on to different flavors of same old operating model and methodologies
4. Attrition

IT in India heading for a fall

I posted this in my personal blog. Just copying it here.

Economist in it's post Is India's computer-services industry heading for a fall? talks about the challenges that India Inc. will face.

The reasons that they quote are:
1. Insufficient infrastructure
2. Talent shortage - India Inc. runs on man power.
3. Employee "jumping"
4. Competition
5. Future threats - American economy slump, automation

While I agree to all the points, I have few points to add.

Methodology and capability to deliver

Foremost challenge Indian IT giants face is the struggle to offer innovative solutions. Please note that I am not talking about product companies and only about IT services companies. I have not seen major application development deals being won on the basis of traditional methodologies. There is a lack of ability in solving new business problems.

All IT companies have "Onsite-Offshore model" and their proprietary "development methodologies". Essentially, these are all flavors of the same thing. All of these showcase the company's ability to deliver and how it can help the client go to market with reduced costs. But, you cannot see these IT firms pitching in for new technologies. Atlease not too many of them. If I try to find out, how many IT services firms India have expertise in ILOG JRules or IBM Process Server, there will be only very few who can offer solutions. Unless the client asks for a specific technology to be implemented, or a Software Products vendor recommends a services firm to the client, this never happens. There are CoEs (Center of Excellence) coming up in most of the IT firms to nurture talent and help innovation. But, the effectiveness has to be questioned. Also, the employees in services firms are so busy doing billable work that they hardly find time to spend on CoEs. However, there are new small firms sprouting all over India, trying to provide innovative solutions, but they do not have the nerve to hit big deals. Here comes the other factor, which I want to talk about.

Resources

The quality of resources have gone down. IT firms are increasingly relying on Non-IIT graduates, and offlate B.Sc, B.A and B.Com graduates. The justification is that these resources are cheap and the work that we have can be done by these guys. But, with this approach, how will you nurture innovation? Another aspect to the resources issue is career growth. After 2 years of industry experience, most of them wants to get into management side. This, either leads to employee leaving the company, or we end up seeing a lateral hire/fresher.

Quality of recruitment also have be inspected. 80% of the hires turnout to be just machines with no brains of their own. SOA is the latest buzzword. While you see sales team and architects suggesting SOA based approach, how many employees in an IT services firm understand what SOA is? How far can this organic growth go? With dollar value falling and rising inflation, how will we sustain the 10-15% growth in salaries?

Aquisition and merger trend

Yasu Tech bought by SAP. Wipro acquires AMS and Nervewire. Infosys acquires Expert Information Service. And the list goes on ...

This is a good strategy. Inorganic growth, no IT investment required, no more hiring required. Acquiring European firms will definitely help penetration into Non-English market. But, how will they face the challenge of integration issues? We have seen this time and again.

My project lead in one of my previous projects, had told aroudn 2 years back. Most of what we do now will be automated. We will end up becoming machines doing maintenance job. I hope not. All of this when Internet is facing a meltdown in another 3 years.