Clip of the Day: The Proclaimers (note the name in the newspaper at 2:24)
Cloud computing has a huge indirect effect on telework by repositioning the enterprise smarts, for lack of a better phrase, somewhere other than the corporate data center. The main goals of delivering applications and storing data in this manner are to save money in personnel and infrastructure. One of the secondary positive impacts is to equalize the experience, at least to some degree, between the in-office and out-of-office experience.
Social networking is much the same. Use of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook in a general sense makes location a bit less important. Again, it isn’t the primary goal, but it occurs.
The two together – cloud and social networking – create a great environment for teleworkers. And it’s happening, most recently in the purchase of Rypple by Salesforce.com. Rypple defines itself as a “a cloud-based social performance management company.” See the release for quotes from all parties. The firm essentially helps organizations increase the utility and efficiency of corporate social networking. It is unnecessary to point out how central mobility is to that vision.
The bottom line is that mobility and, hence, telework is deeply ingrained in the business world of today. The big pieces of technology – cloud and social networking are two of the biggest – are coming together in a way that extends this and, in the process, further enfranchises teleworkers.
