548 Part IV • The Information Management System
- Improved work-life balanceEmployees who work at
home typically are able to spend more time with
family members by working very early in the morn-
ing or very late in the evening. - Easier accommodation of communications across
time zonesEmployees who need to communicate
with others in different time zones sometimes find it
easier to integrate meeting times that extend their
workdays if they can communicate from their
homes.
Some companies have also reported significant
savings from implementing telecommuting programs of
various types. For example, over a period of more than
five years, 12,500 employees at IBM gave up dedicated
office space in company buildings, and the company
achieved multimillion annual dollar savings (Agpar,
1998). In some geographic regions within the United
States with major air pollution problems (e.g., Los
Angeles), governments have experimented with requiring
companies of a certain size (or setting up tax incentives
for them) to establish telecommuting programs so
that only a certain percentage of their employees are
physically commuting to work within a given workweek.
However, telecommuters may also require immediate
help desk support outside of normal work hours; in many
large, distributed organizations, 24 ×7 user support, at
some level, has become the norm.
Organizations with telecommuters also need to
redesign their performance appraisal systems to focus on
performance outcomes so that the telecommuter is not
penalized for different (and less visible) approaches to
achieving work objectives. Some companies only allow
“proven stars,” not newcomers, to telecommute, and
some managers still believe that telecommuting weakens
loyalty to the company (Dunham, 2000).
Some telecommuters also report a sense of isolation:
Remote workers don’t have the opportunity for informal
social interactions that working in an office building
fosters. Regular meetings at times and places that telecom-
muters can attend in-person can help increase social inter-
actions with supervisors and among coworkers and make
electronic communications more meaningful. Concerns
about missing advancement opportunities due to the belief
that being “out-of-sight” would mean that they are less
well known and therefore less likely to be considered for a
given career opportunity may also need to be addressed.
Training programs for not only telecommuters but also
supervisors of telecommuters can be developed to help
avoid some of these nontechnical obstacles.
Telecommuting programs also need to take into
account security and legal issues. Employees need to be
aware of organizational policies for maintaining the con-
fidentiality of company data and the use of company
equipment for personal reasons. A newer solution being
reported for travelers in particular is to not keep sensitive
(e.g., project-related) documents on laptops, but to
instead let an organization’s “cloud” deliver the applica-
tion programs and associated data to the employee’s
device when required (Iyer and Henderson, 2010).Managing IT Applications
Most organizations have a substantial investment in soft-
ware applications used throughout the business. In some
organizations, one can still find thousands of programs and
millions of lines of code that are the result of investing
millions of dollars in thousands of staff-years for custom
systems development—with or without the help of outside
contractors. Today, commercial software packages are
typically used whenever possible to decrease the costs of
original software development and an ongoing dependence
on internal software engineering skills.
Implemented software applications become critical
assets without which a company cannot operate. One of
the key management dilemmas is when to abandon an
aginglegacy systemand invest in a new IT solution versus
continuing to incur the costs of maintaining it. In the early
1990s, it was not uncommon for large organizations based
in the United States to be spending 80 percent of their
application software budget on legacy system mainte-
nance, rather than on new software. An increased usage of
software packages provides some relief as upgrades, and
maintenance becomes the responsibility of the vendor.
However, the organization is still dependent on the soft-
ware vendor. (See Chapter 10 for a discussion of the
advantages and disadvantages of packaged versus custom
software applications.)An Applications Portfolio Approach
Thinking about a firm’s software assets as an IT applica-
tions portfolioto be continuously managed helps an
organization make these types of difficult decisions. As
discussed in Chapter 12, decisions about the development
of new applications and the maintenance of legacy appli-
cations should be subject to a set of guidelines derived
from the organization’s current vision, IT architecture,
and strategic IS plans for the future. These guidelines
should also provide a corporate-level policy as to what
degree application investments at the “local” (functional,
divisional) level are appropriate, as opposed to the imple-
mentation of “shared” IT applications (as described
earlier), as well as the extent to which corporate IS