Meredith Levinson writes in CIO magazine about a company that closed their offices, and now everyone will work at home

“…to save money and spare employees the hassle and rising cost of commuting and … can continue to serve customers while simultaneously saving $400,000 a year simply by closing its 15,000 square feet of office space.”

The company, Chorus, provides clinical, practice management and financial software for health care providers learned a few things along the way. You need:

• the right infrastructure to support a virtual, telecommuting set of employees.

• work policies designed to maintain employee productivity and customer service levels,

• desktop support and identify software tools to make employee workloads more transparent for managers

• to phase in the work at home plan,

• periodic meet ups and daily conference calls

Did it work? Levinson writes “CEO Schreiber…says the client services group’s key performance indicators have been ’stellar’ and that the company as a whole is more productive.”

Read the three part series for all the details. It’s good stuff.

Part 1: Chorus’s technology infrastructure
Part 2: Chorus establishes work-at-home policies and figures out how to provide remote tech support.
Part 3: Chorus‘ managers and staff adjust to telecommuting and share their keys to success

The printing press changed the world in the 13th century by spreading the word, but the telephone was the first technology that made working together at a distance possible in real time. Telegraph and semaphore flags, you might argue, made that possible too; but you’ll have to admit the bandwidth was pretty low. The bits per second transmitted were just that, bits per second; but it wasn’t long until engineers figured out how to send thousands of bits for sounds and then millions for pictures.

In 1831 Michael Faraday proved that vibrations of metal could be converted to electrical impulses, but it was forty-five years before Alexander Graham Bell applied the discovery and was issued a patent for the telephone. The following year he formed the Bell Telephone Company, and installed the first city exchange in Hartford, Connecticut.

In 1878 the world’s first telephone directory was published, no mammoth tome suitable for use as a kid’s booster chair, it was a single sheet of only fifty names (numbers weren’t used yet). That year President Hayes installed the first telephone in the White House. The first outgoing call went to Alexander Graham Bell himself, who had to be told to speak more slowly. It was six years, 1883, before you could talk to someone in another city—The Big Apple and Bean Town were the first to be connected.

In 1912 the Navy experimented with air to ground radio using Morse code. In 1921 the Detroit Police Department, began experimentation with one-way mobile voice service, so-called radio-telephone communication, and in 1933 the Bayonne, NJ Police Department made it possible to call “Car 54 where are you?” and expect an answer over the first two-way system. In 1946 a driver in St. Louis, Mo., placed the first mobile telephone call, and within two years wireless telephone service was available (at a high price) in almost 100 cities and highway corridors.

An engineer by the name of Ring (yes, really) at Bell Labs dreamed up the idea for cell phones, but in 1947 the technology to do it didn’t exist. In fact, it wasn’t until 1973, when Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first cellphone call—to his rival Joe Engel of AT&T Bell Labs—using a phone about the size and weight of a brick. Ten years later the first commercial cellular service was launched ushering in the era of “can you hear me now?”

Bell Lab’s PicturePhone was test marketed in the early 60’s, a big hit at the Seattle World’s Fair, and commercial service debuted in Pittsburgh in 1970; but it was a resounding flop because of steep price and poor picture quality. Still, it did presage the day when you could visually bring people together.

High-end teleconference centers were built, and executives across the country and around the world could meet eye-to-eye, if not face-to-face. If wasn’t long until web-based conferencing systems allowed one-to-many presentations, albeit without any facility for interaction and exchange.

Other systems designed to allow collaboration came along, but were often hard to use because they weren’t intuitive—designed for geeks by geeks—and in many cases they were more limited than the technology they tried to replicate. Online whiteboards, for example, cost tens of thousands of dollars, but had all of the limitations of real whiteboards and none of the advantages that could have been added such as highlighting, or presentation and mark-up of existing content.

Meanwhile, computers and networks were evolving from centralized systems with dedicated terminals to distributed networks of personal computers. Mobile workers, otherwise know as road warriors, with laptop computers began to make hotel reservations based on the availability of internet access. Marriott responded to the demand and now has over 100,000 wired rooms. Even airlines are investigating airborne internet access, with Luftansa and American leading they way.

One reason telework is coming into its own, is that all this and more is now available at affordable prices, and even free. Today Apple ships their Macintosh® computers with built in webcams and free iChat software, for example, so people can videoconference while sharing photos, documents and presentations. Google, some believe, is preparing to blanket the U.S. with free Wi-Fi to make access to their click-though ads more ubiquitous.

When sharing information from anywhere is as easy as meeting face-to-face telework will become the standard way of working

For programmer Ivan Bowman a trip to the boss’s office would be an 800 mile jaunt from his home office in Nova Scotia to Ontario. So he sends an avatar instead.

His virtual self is tall and lanky, sometimes compared to a coat rack. But it gives him a presence at the office, and keeps communication flowing–a crucial consideration when you work from home, out of sight and potentially out of mind.

When we think about how people will be working in the future, the weird things going on with our economy keep grabbing our attention as pivotal factors. Recently we wrote about how bankruptcies were mushrooming, and a few weeks ago we wrote about how the mortgage mess will clobber credit buyers before long as government regulators crack down. And that will ripple into industries that depend on credit buyers.

But there’s something else going on that deserves careful consideration too: Foreign buyers continue to grab U.S. assets. In fact, they set a record last year when they purchased $414 billion of our assets. Sure, the dollar was cheap, but stocks were at record highs and no bargain, so what were foreign buyers up to?

The three artificial islands in Dubai are the world’s biggest man-made islands. Each was built from a staggering 1 billion cubic meters of dredged sand and stone, taken from Dubai’s sea bed and configured into individual islands and surrounding breakwaters. The complex will house a variety of tourist attractions, ranging from spas and diving sites to apartments and theaters. The entire complex is designed to collectively resemble a date palm tree when seen from the sky.

One answer is that in the ’70s we started buying more from other countries than they were buying from us. In the late 1990s things really took off, and have been flying ever since. A measure of that flow is the U.S. trade deficit with China. Since the two countries completed a free-trade agreement in 1999, that gap has grown from $69 billion then to $256 billion last year. Why? Economics, like nature abhors a vacuum. So all those dollars we sent out into the world come back as purchases of our goods and services, and the rest–equal to the trade deficit–come back as investments. Usually those investments are mostly in U.S. bonds, but foreigners who hold lots of our bonds tend to get nervous when they realize we might make our debt less of a problem by inflating the currency (which makes the foreigners’ holdings less valuable). So foreign creditors cover their bets by buying ownership directly in our assets.

That’s what’s happening these days, and we ain’t seen the last of it for two reasons: First, the Fed’s rate cuts are inflationary and have spooked foreign creditors even more, so they’re buying more equity. Second, our trade deficit continues to grow, and will probably exceed $700 Billion–that’s all money that will have to come back as more investment in the U.S. predominately from China, Singapore and Arab nations.

Until recently these funds were used to prop up our economy so we’d be an attractive market for foreign goods. But a new reality and priority is emerging. Even though the rest of the world’s economy is still somewhat dependent on U.S. demand, most rich economies are in better shape than ours, and many emerging economies “are growing nicely on the back of rising domestic demand and regional trade links,” according to The Economist magazine.

But what if the rest of the world can do well while we stagnate? Most ethnocentric American’s assume that our economy floats up and down from troughs of inflation to peaks of prosperity independent from the rest of the world. But our economy is closely tied to China, Singapore and Arab nations. And there’s absolutely nothing that says that has to continue.

And it’s not just wealth and prosperity that Asia is building up. China and others are also building political influence and power, with the result that the West will cede global leadership to Asia. After dominating manufacturing, Asian companies moved on to services, and now research and development. It is only a matter of time before Asia starts to build up its military power, too.