FMC, mobility, and a few hard facts
Today, I'm mostly going to talk about mobility… Let's start with a few numbers. No groaning please, this won't take long and it'll be relatively painless.
According to the UK's Office of National Statistics (ONS) there are over 3 million people in the UK who work mainly in their own homes or in different places using home as a base. This had been growing at about 2% a year. Nearly 80% of home-workers use a telephone and computer to carry out their work. The number of this 'teleworker' segment is growing at five-times the growth of home-workers in general. The majority of home-workers (60%+) is self-employed. About 40% of this group are teleworkers.
Relatively few people work mainly in their own home. More than half are what I would call Location Independent Workers. If you work in sales, you'll know the situation: you work from home, not at home, and spend the day in your car.
So there are in excess of 1.8 million people who work in different places using their home as a base; but the majority is self-employed rather than corporate. The UK ONS data implies that the market for corporate teleworkers is substantially less than a million workers. I must be missing something because the world's gone mobility mad – for what, six or seven hundred thousand seats out of a working population of about 28 million?
The missing piece is a happy band of men (and women) who work from home perhaps a day a week. Even ONS find this group of people very difficult to measure but when you include the occasional exec who works from home on a Friday the flex working market gets a substantial boost.
But if the market necessarily includes people who work from home irregularly, doesn't this imply something about the nature of the services offered? I mean, how do you justify a dedicated desk at home, much less a dedicated PC and telephone, if you are not going to be there more than a day a week?
The answer is that we (of course I include myself!) make do with laptops, PDAs and mobile phones that we use wherever they find ourselves to be. We're not teleworkers; we're just working. The same bunch of workers is increasingly sat at a hotdesk when they're in the office. Working from home is neither better nor worse, unless like me you enjoy good coffee and resent having to pay the canteen for your cup of wakefulness.
Enter "Fixed Mobile Convergence". FMC recognises that the worker will be using a mobile phone all of the time, but sometimes will be in the office and sometimes not. Only 20% of workers are tied to the desk, according to Frost & Sullivan (F&S). F&S also says that intra-company calling accounts for half of a cellular phone bill, and a third of the bill originates from inside enterprise premises. It makes a lot of sense to tap into the wireless infrastructure at work, home – or at the nearest coffee shop.
If you can also tap into the functionality of the corporate PBX as well, that's an added extra. A seamless handover is a sweet trick too, if you can manage it. But to start off with the sell is going to be cost-related… Put it this way: the finance director will listen to the kerr-ching of the cash drawer, before they notice the bells and whistles.
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