INTERVIEW:
Question 1
The term telework is a broad one with a lot of different meanings. How would you define
telework?
Answer
We deliberately try to avoid too narrow a definition of telework. It covers, as you say, a
very wide range of new working practices, whether these are part-time working from home to
avoid a daily commute part of the week, or working in an office near where people live,
again to avoid long-distance travelling. It may involve working at the premises of
organisations that have customers of the organisation working away from a traditional
office environment, but it's because we're still in a process of very rapid evolution and
change in working practices that we don't want to pin down too narrow a definition of
teleworking. This of course does give us more difficulties in trying to quantify the
number of people involved in telework activities, but we have gone to some trouble at the
European level to make sure that we have consistent estimates between the member states so
that we can compare the pace of change in each of the member states of the European Union.
Question 2
Can give us and estimate of the number of teleworkers?
Answer
We did a survey during the course of last year in the five major European Union countries,
in the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. And we see by far the largest number of
people involved in teleworking is in the United Kingdom. It is partly due to a greater
flexibility of working practices and business practices in that environment associated
with the greater linkage to the United States business environment. We see the least
number of teleworkers currently in Spain and Italy and we are concerned at the European
level that there could be a comparability in the pace of change in all of the European
countries. One of the reasons why we're particularly happy to accept an invitation from
the city of Rome to hold this particular conference in Rome is the hope that this will
perhaps give a further boost to the take up of some of the new working practices in the
southern countries of the European Union. The total number involved across the European
Union is on the whole probably over 1 million people involved in teleworking practices
that are recognised by their employers and are part of the accepted working agreements
with the organisations that employ people. There are of course a lot of people that quite
incidentally and perhaps outside the normal working practice agreements work outside the
office environment part of the time. We are concerned that this new working practice is
formalised in some sense that there is an agreement between the employers and the
employees that defines who is responsible, what the working practices can be made to
represent.
Question 3
Among the different terms which have been used to define or to describe some kind of
telework there is that of the virtual office. How do you see it? How can one define the
virtual office?
Answer
This is a concept that has arisen mainly in small business activities. If, for instance,
you have a small company that is manufacturing or selling products in the Italian market
and they wish to establish a sales office in London, for example, but don't wish to invest
in physical office space in London, to take on permanent staff to carry out the sales
functions in that office - at least until they've established whether there is a market
for the product in the London environment - it is quite possible for that company to
establish what we would call a virtual office in another country with a local telephone
number. That number can be called by customers in the London area and the calls received
and rediverted then to the office in Italy, if there is a customer that wants further
information about products. So this is a virtual presence of that company in a different
market without necessarily having the physical office space and the permanent staff that
go with it. It's a very important way that smaller companies in the European Union can
start to use the single European market to enlarge the market for their services without a
large initial investment. But this is again another example of how working at a distance,
representing your company' products and services at a distance, can now be enabled through
the information networks in a very cost-effective way.
Question 4
There are a lot of experimental projects which are promoted by the European Community, by
the EC Commission in the field of new information technologies. Perhaps you can describe
some of them, maybe one which you consider to be particularly interesting or stimulating.
Answer
We support a large number of activities at the European level, particularly in technology
development where there is a need to establish common standards so that there is proper
interoperation between the communication networks in Europe. But we also support
investment stimulation actions and some of those have been particularly successful in the
area of small business networking in telework development. We had a project last year that
tried to establish a mechanism so that small business in each of the European regions
could become users of the Internet and the World Wide Web as a marketing and a sales
vehicle for their products. That has already resulted in a very considerable interest from
small business communities around the European regions. We supported also a very careful
assessment of business reengineering practice across the European Union. The reports from
that project are available at the conference today and again showing that most of the
major European companies are involved in a substantial structural change that as part of
its result does enable much more flexible range of working practices to be introduced.
It's difficult to go into all of the projects that we support at the European level; there
are many hundreds of projects. Italian companies are very well represented in this area of
European technology development and research and we have always seen not only the larger
Italian companies involved but also large numbers of smaller companies active at the
European level.
Question 5
An increasing number of transactions are going to take lace on the Internet and other kind
of networks and there are economic problems associated with this as well as technical
problems. What does the EC Commission think of those problems? Is there some activity in
this field?
Answer
It is very important for European business that companies are now able to market and to
cooperate across the world-wide networks. We are seeing now a very rapid growth in what we
would call electronic commerce, where there are trading transactions, but it's initiated
and concluded across the Internet and the associated networks. There are still problems to
be solved. Perhaps the technical solutions are there but some of the implementations of
those technical solutions still have some way to go. We do need to ensure that in Europe
there is a coherent system that both protects confidential information, that gives
assurance to customers of companies that their transactions are in fact valid
transactions, in both senses between the customer and the suppliers of goods and services.
The discussions on some of these issues are in fact very difficult both politically and
administratively. There are new mechanisms to be put in place at the European and the
world-wide level for the security of payment transactions across the networks. We see in
the United States that much progress has now been made in that particular contest to
assure that these transactions can be confidential and validated, that the solutions that
have emerged in the United States are not necessarily those that are easily applicable in
the European market in which we have many different languages that much be accommodated by
these transaction mechanisms. These can't all be carried out in English. Much of the small
business community will want to conclude its transactions in the language that they're
used to dealing with. The banking and payment systems do need to be coherent across the
single European market, and there is still some progress to be made, but we're very
confident that the solutions can be found and can be found very quickly.
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