INTERVIEW:
Question 1
The term telework is a broad one used to characterise a plurality of different activities.
How do you define telework?
Answer
I would call telework any work which it is possible to do essentially from anywhere around
the globe. So wherever one is, one could fully be involved in one's own working process.
One does not need to be in a particular place, at a particular time to do the added value
that one brings into the work process.
Question 2
Among the concepts related to telework one of the most stimulating is that of virtual
company. What is your idea of a virtual company?
Answer
Until now companies have been defined essentially by organisational structures and by
people being in certain places at certain times. In particular, authority in companies was
organised by certain high level people being able to have personal control over people who
worked for them. The point with virtual companies is that you organise people around the
globe that are teleworkers for a specific task or purpose and for a certain time frame
they inter-operate as a company does today, but without being necessarily in a particular
physical location together. They can be distributed or they might change over time, but
for a certain time period they electronically work together to perform a virtual company.
Question 3
Many different European Community projects explore the possibilities offered by the new
information technologies. If you were to single out the most innovative and interesting
one, which one would you choose and why?
Answer
This is a very tough question because on the European level we have so many very
interesting projects going on. For instance, projects that give us completely new options
in video films, so that would be an element to add to the personal, private components of
life. We have very nice projects for medium-sized companies, for instance. But I think the
most interesting from my point of view is the project AIT, which will give us completely
new options of co-operation in the machine industry and the car industry. Now engineers
all around the globe can simultaneously work on the same computer-aided design models of
future cars, for instance. So we can co-operate along the value-added chain with the same
kind of models and tools being available on our computers, though we are in completely
different places. That really means that in some cases we can work better together in this
distributed way than we could years ago when we met in one place.
Question 4
Can you talk to us about the legal aspects of telework?
Answer
There are an enormous number of legal questions that have to do with ownership, that have
to do with the rights of those who work and those who pay. The question is whether we will
stay more in the traditional kind of relationship between somebody who is the company
owner and somebody who works for him, or if it will go in the direction of one-person
small companies subcontracting with all kinds of virtual companies. The question has a
kind of social impact. Do we stay with traditional models and the strong influence of
labour unions? Or do we want to go - or due to market pressures have to go - more towards
personal responsibility? Of course all this will be a question of transition, so what we
do today could be completely different from where we will end up 20 years from now.
Question 5
Do you think that telework may imply the risk of losing the interpersonal dimension of
work, the risk of physical if not social and cultural isolation?
Answer
I am not afraid of this at all. Over thousands of years humans have always been able to
adapt to their personal needs; they have always found ways to be together with other
people. The fact that today we use the working environment for this is absolutely not a
normal situation: three or four hundred years ago it was different. If we do a lot of work
in the future in the form of telework, we will certainly find new forms of social
interaction. From what I have seen up to now, the networks are a very good medium to come
into contact with people and to meet with people privately afterwards. We see with older
or physically and mobility handicapped people that the telechannel offers them new forms
of interaction which they did not have before. So I'm quite optimistic in this respect. We
will have other problems, but the social context will not be the main focus.
Question 6
And these other problems?
Answer
We have very big problems on a global scale. These problems have to do with our overuse of
resources. We produce too much pollution and we now see that the whole world is following
this pattern, so we will certainly have to become less materialistic in our life-styles
and that will be tough. We also see that this teleworking process, of course, will bring
all parts of the world into this virtual company picture. We notice this already today.
This puts strong pressure on employment. We are losing working opportunities to the rest
of the world. That is good for them. That might be good for the globe, but at the moment
it puts a heavy burden on our social systems. And we will have to find quite new solutions
also in this framework. The situation is not hopeless. If we use telematics in the right
way, we can produce more quality of life with less resources everywhere on the globe, but
we have to do this very deliberately and we have to come to terms between the north and
the south, and that is a political question that is not easy and that we all have to work
on.
Question 7
Is this now the situation in Germany?
Answer
This is, of course, a problem in Germany. It is also a problem in Italy. It is a problem
everywhere in Europe and we have to work on that problem. It is not easy. It means really
that we make the rest of the world an equal partner in going through a long transition
period to finally achieve a situation where everybody around the world can live in a
decent way. But reasonably it should be less people on a higher standard of living using
much less resources than we do today. And that means "dematerialisation", using
telematics to achieve that aim.
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