Flash back to 2001. In an IEEE article called Managing a Mobile Workforce, author Terrance Malkinson took a futuristic look at the workplace.

“The rules of business are going to change. Employers will have boundaryless access to the world’s finest resources: the most skilled labor, the most advanced technology, and a large customer and supplier base. Rapid advances in digital technology are slashing the cost of communications and computing. Employees will be using small, networked devices, wireless, electronic relationships, and electronic signatures to conduct business.”

He also highlighted the advantages of going mobile. At the time, these plusses included, for example, reduced capital expenditures related to offices and associated infrastructure; increased productivity since mobile workers tend to work longer hours with less time spent on commuting; and the ability of mobile workers to keep operations productive regardless of traffic jams, weather conditions, or when the workplace becomes uninhabitable due to anything from office renovations to disasters. (It’s also interesting to note that this article was written during or after 9/11, an event which forced New York City and the rest of the world to quickly invent new ways of doing business in the face of tragedy.)

Fast-forward to the present. In the August 2005 issue of Optimize Magazine, Thomas Davenport, author of an article entitled Rethinking the Mobile Workforce, discusses how various companies in the mid-1990s started down the path of forming virtual offices enabling knowledge workers to function from home, Starbucks, the Admirals Club, or even the beach. ‘Hoteling’ environments were also created for brief, face-to-face gatherings. Before one can determine who’s doing what and where they’re doing it, however, Davenport suggests caution right from the start. Consider that we’re not even sure how many knowledge workers exist: wildly varying estimates suggest that knowledge workers represent anywhere from one-quarter up to half of the U.S. workforce.

Davenport states, “Technology has probably been the single most important intervention in knowledge-worker performance over the past couple of decades. PCs, personal-productivity software, PDAs, mobile technologies, and other applications have transformed knowledge work. These employees can now create, share, and use information and knowledge almost anywhere and at any time.” Malkinson should be proud of his prediction.

Are we—as companies or individuals—any better off now that our homes are often also our workplace, and we’re tethered to cell phones, PDAs, Blackberries, and notebook PCs when we venture outside? Davenport continues, “In fact, a decade later, many pioneering companies have retreated from the virtual-office concept. Stories abound of unsuccessful attempts to connect to a wireless network via laptop or phone. From an organizational standpoint, virtual offices have fallen short in many ways…”. Monitoring and controlling workers has become more difficult, virtual workers felt that they were out of sight and out of mind and thus didn’t advance as quickly in their careers, and some workers found that being out of the company’s arms also meant that they didn’t have access to such resources as technical and marketing libraries or sample products.

In research for his upcoming book, Thinking for a Living (Harvard Business School Press, September 2005), Davenport discovered that going mobile isn’t an all-or-nothing commitment. Rather, differently skilled workers in varying office/home/mobile situations require a ‘segmented’ approach to optimize their productivity. “The degree of mobility in a job can influence what kind of office a knowledge worker needs, the types of technology he or she will use, the manager’s relative ability to observe the worker’s performance, and the ease of communicating with the worker. Sometimes, mobility can be a critical element in designing a particular knowledge-work process. For example, should the process be performed in one place—such as mortgage approvals at a bank headquarters—or in various locations, as in the case of mortgage approvals at the client site?” Translated to engineering or manufacturing, segmentation factors might include the tools and procedures required to give some workers formidable design tools and intense database access from powerful notebooks, while technicians may be best served with less horsepower and better real-time access to devices in the field. That’s only a small part of the equation involving technology, however. While all of the technological tools are available, Davenport describes them as ‘disconnected.’

That disconnection is not only borne of slotting certain devices and connections to best serve certain job-related tasks but, more importantly, that companies are in the infancy of making ‘mobile’ work in terms of ‘social capital’: “the stock of active connections among people: the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviors that bind the members of human networks and communities, and make cooperative action possible.”

According to Davenport, “While it’s clearly possible to substitute virtual communications for physical ones in some work situations, it’s difficult to strike up electronic relationships when there has been no physical interaction before. Most of our electronic contacts are people whom we also know through face-to-face interactions.”

The most striking of Davenport’s points also hit closest to home. Among his guidelines, he suggests that managers…

…assess work outputs, not inputs—not how many hours are put into a task (Or, I might add, the timeframe in which those working hours take place.) but the quality and quantity of output.

…determine the appropriate strength of network ties, e.g. communicating with people in the next office via e-mail at one extreme, or firing someone via voicemail at the other.

…encourage people not to work all the time. Even on vacation or downtime, we take notebooks and cells and PDAs with us. “Working this much causes personal stress and strains family lives.”

There are no hard and fast rules at this point in time, however. He says that experimentation is “an apt term given the lack of knowledge.”

Nowhere in that extensive and exceedingly well-researched and -written article, however, did Davenport mention the joy of working in your shorts with your dog playing assistant.