and another would house a company’s public relations department. This idea does have the important advantage of, say, letting accountants pore over their electronic ledgers in each other’s company. Yet what about the unlucky ones who lived in suburbs across town?[[68]]
They would prefer, presumably, the kind of center propounded by Richard C. Harkness, a former professor at the University of Washington who later joined Satellite Business Systems.
Under the Harkness plan, an employee would go to the center closest to his home. “He might even walk there,” Harkness says. According to him, a large company might have as many neighborhood centers as elementary schools—leasing offices for individual workers or small groups. Imagine a professional building with a real estate agency next to a stockbroker, a doctor across the hall from a commodities trader. Well, that’s how it would be in a building housing neighborhood centers, except a sign outside a suite might say “General Motors” rather than “Dr. Pearlman.” Of course a company might instead have fewer centers and lease whole floors. Stepping off the elevator, you’d see the foot-high letters reminding you you were in GM territory. Workers would benefit from the companionship of perhaps several dozen colleagues, quick access to secretarial and copying services, and similar support.
“My way is more radical than locating people by jobs,” says Harkness, “since an accountant could be in one place and his boss in another.” Computer networks would maintain entire organizations; a whole new branch of management science would develop to hone procedures to manage telecommuters. Perhaps the day will come when IBM will endow Harvard Business School with a telecommuting chair.
A third form of neighborhood center would be a munytel, as I’ll call it—a municipally or privately run center with terminals capable of linking up with many companies’ equipment. Individual employees, not companies, might rent munytel offices.
Munytels would not bolster employees’ corporate loyalties; but some companies wouldn’t care, favoring other ways.[[69]]
Munytels, moreover, could be ideal for free-lance telecommuters who valued a clear line between home and office. Workers would be at these neighborhood centers all the time or whenever they preferred and space was available. Fed up temporarily with toiling alongside a sullen spouse at home? Then you’d flee to a munytel, unless your free-lance work involved confidential company information; in which case you might drive to a GM or Prudential suite with a spare terminal.
Neighbors with similar or complementary skills might gather at munytels and pool resources to seek contracts from large companies. Why not use computerized lists to bring together people in the first place? “Neighborhood work centers could themselves become employers, selling clerical or professional services to other organizations,” said one of the consultants working with Harkness on a landmark telecommuting study for the Stanford Research Institute in the late 1970s.
Munytels, in addition, could be drop-off points for messengers from corporations’ headquarters. They would deliver printed material—books, for instance—that companies couldn’t flash across the screens of telecommuters at home and munytels.
Also, and perhaps just as important, munytels could serve as informal neighborhood clubs.